[HN Gopher] OpenAI's Windsurf deal is off, and Windsurf's CEO is...
___________________________________________________________________
OpenAI's Windsurf deal is off, and Windsurf's CEO is going to
Google
Author : rcchen
Score : 934 points
Date : 2025-07-11 21:35 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theverge.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theverge.com)
| Ancalagon wrote:
| So Google, Meta, and Microsoft will just hollow out the best AI
| startups of their talent instead of buying them - out of fear of
| monopoly lawsuits I'm assuming?
|
| Nice plan I guess. Kind of obvious to spot though.
| brianwawok wrote:
| Likely cheaper too. Nothing to pay the original shareholders
| Kinrany wrote:
| It's been working with software developers with no issues.
| bix6 wrote:
| Can shareholders sue? I presume the only avenue is IP since
| that belongs to the company? Or the non-exclusive license
| somehow negates that? Brutal.
| Ancalagon wrote:
| I actually don't know if there's much that can be done unless
| there's some non-competes in those employees' contracts which
| are usually not very enforceable outside of finance iirc.
| bix6 wrote:
| Non competes aren't enforceable in California but the
| company owns the IP so I'm curious about this license
| loophole they are using.
| nrmitchi wrote:
| Non competes can definitely be enforceable in California
| for executives and those with fiduciary responsibilities
| to a company.
|
| They're just not enforceable against "rank and file"
| employees.
| bix6 wrote:
| The only situation I know of is during a sale of business
| if the seller agrees. Which is clearly not the case here.
| rafaelmn wrote:
| Is there any IP that's actually valuable without the team
| ? I sincerely doubt it.
| bix6 wrote:
| The whole point of funding a company is for the company
| to build IP that makes the company valuable. Founders
| can't take investor money and then just go start another
| company -- that's specifically barred in most docs. There
| have been a lot of these weird "loopholes" lately that
| are completely against the spirit of company building.
| 1024core wrote:
| The real IP is between the ears...
| riwsky wrote:
| "We underpaid you relative to what price you were able to
| command on the market, and you left, how DARE you!"
| bix6 wrote:
| "We spent our time and money helping you and now you leave
| taking everything with you and leaving us with nothing"
|
| You think the only people in a company that matter are a
| few founders? It's ok to screw over everyone else?
| khazhoux wrote:
| "Buying the startup" just means handing over megabucks to do-
| nothing investors. If Google isn't buying any product or
| technology, why should investors get a talent fee?
| bix6 wrote:
| Do nothing investors who enabled the company to reach this
| point? Employees who chose lower salaries in expectation of
| shares being worth something? Come on now.
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| > Do nothing investors who enabled the company to reach
| this point?
|
| Were you under the impression that venture capital is
| anything more than rent-seeking?
| bix6 wrote:
| Sure if you want to be negative about it and only look at
| the worst VCs. But the best VCs provide significant value
| outside capital and can be instrumental in a startups
| success or failure.
| presentation wrote:
| Very edgy so cool
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| There are many AI startups and we are just in the beginning of
| learning how to use them. There will be some stupid company
| like those you've listed that figures out a way to use AI that
| is far better than any other implementation, and Google, Meta,
| and Microsoft may go the way of Yahoo and AOL, but we'll see
| bix6 wrote:
| Doesn't seem like it. Antitrust has no teeth so the mega
| corps are just buying all the talent with life changing cash.
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| The "talent" is not very talented, trust me. These are the
| short term whims of very large, increasingly bloated
| organizations. A leaner startup that knows what it has will
| not sell so quickly. At least, the odds will soon be in
| favor of whoever first decides to take that bet.
| tlogan wrote:
| I'm honestly just surprised that the CEO and co-founder decided
| to walk away from the company and leave behind all these
| employees he was leading. Especially considering many of them
| probably joined for lower pay, hoping for a big upside.
|
| Maybe there's more to the story.
| quantified wrote:
| When you want to make a big impact for a big payday, why
| would this surprise you?
|
| Gentle reminder that more startups die by suicide than
| homicide, and that an early-stage startup is a total
| crapshoot.
| tlogan wrote:
| Yes, startups are always a bit of a gamble, but this feels
| like a captain abandoning ship while it's still full of
| sailors (many of whom have families depending on them).
|
| This really is a whole new level of getting screwed.
| Espressosaurus wrote:
| This is why advice is always to treat options for a non-
| public company as if they're near zero in value.
|
| Because for most people, they will end up being worth
| exactly zero in value. Less if they went and exercised
| those options prior to a liquidity event that may never
| happen.
| LunaSea wrote:
| Isn't this the case for pretty much every startup that
| gets sold?
|
| Founders get a big pay day and leave within a couple
| years while 100 employees share a 1% of the company
| between themselves.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| rule 1: never believe a word a founder says
| munificent wrote:
| You're surprised that a CEO did something that massively
| financially benefitted them personally at the expense of rank
| and file employees?
|
| You sweet summer child.
| brap wrote:
| This is the direct result of regulations. As usual regulations
| backfire. Expect more regulations to address this, surely they
| won't backfire as well.
| Sammi wrote:
| This is overly reductionist. The are plenty of laws that work
| well.
|
| Any time I hear someone talk about more or less regulation,
| instead of talking about better or worse regulation, I
| suspect they are ideologists and trying to shift the
| narrative, or else they would be able to criticise based on
| actual merit.
| BrtByte wrote:
| The big players know regulators are watching, so they're doing
| everything but the formal acquisition
| rvnx wrote:
| Windsurf and Cursor are in the business of reselling ChatGPT and
| Claude at a loss, but the tech itself is not impressive at all
| cpursley wrote:
| Those wrappers are gonna go away now that there's Claude Code
| and Googles CLI thing. They are that much better.
| taytus wrote:
| I agree. I use claude desktop with MCP and Gemini CLI
| exclusively. I have 20+ years of writing code, and this is
| awesome!
| warmedcookie wrote:
| Are they?
|
| Cursor's Accept / Reject feature for each change it makes in
| each file is nice whereas I have to use a diff tool to review
| the changes in Claude Code.
|
| Also, if I go down a prompt alley that's a dead end, Cursor
| has the Restore Checkpoint feature to get back to the
| original prompt and try a different path. With Claude Code,
| you had better have committed the code to git, otherwise you
| end up with a mess you didn't want.
|
| My company pays for both, but I mostly use Cursor unless I
| know I am doing a new project or some proof of concept, which
| Claude Code might have an edge on with a more mature TODO
| list feature.
| Unearned5161 wrote:
| I got burned too many times from that Restore Checkpoint
| thing not working right, maybe it's been fixed by now but
| seems silly to rely on something thats not a literal tool
| built for the job (version control), not a good shortcut.
| pqdbr wrote:
| It has worked perfectly for me every time, and it's such
| a great feature.
| reasonableklout wrote:
| Gemini CLI uses a shadow git repo and commits after every
| change, won't be long before Claude Code has that too.
| cpursley wrote:
| That's a neat idea!
| mindwok wrote:
| None of these features are very deep though, there's dozens
| of OSS clones for them already.
| rvnx wrote:
| RooCode/Cline, etc
| m_a_g wrote:
| Looks like Sama can't catch a break.
| parpfish wrote:
| I only learned this week that "sama" is "Sam Altman" and not
| the first name of some other ai startup ceo
| BobbyJo wrote:
| It's his hackernews username.
| browningstreet wrote:
| Well, more actively nowadays, it's his X username...
| mi_lk wrote:
| sama is nothing without drama
| foobiekr wrote:
| Good.
| 3abiton wrote:
| It's unclear if OpenAI cancelled the deal, or Google poached
| them? Either way, this season of "OpenAI Drama" is wild. First
| Meta, now Google. Your turn Amazon / Microsoft.
| jamessinghal wrote:
| Apparently OpenAI allowed the deal to expire; likely Google had
| already been in discussion with Windsurf as I'm sure they knew
| the deal was likely to die well before today.
| sumedh wrote:
| MS probably killed the deal, MS wanted access to Windsurf to
| make Co Pilot better while OpenAI did not want to give them
| access.
| barbazoo wrote:
| > OpenAI's deal to buy Windsurf is off, and Google will instead
| hire Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan, cofounder Douglas Chen, and some
| of Windsurf's R&D employees and bring them onto the Google
| DeepMind team, Google and Windsurf announced Friday.
|
| > Mohan and the Windsurf employees will focus on agentic coding
| efforts at Google DeepMind and work largely on Gemini. Google
| will not have any control over nor a stake in Windsurf, but it
| will take a non-exclusive license to some of Windsurf's
| technology.
|
| Sounds to me like they're "hiring" them like one "hires" a
| consultant?
| nilamo wrote:
| Why the quotes? Consultants are indeed hired for consulting
| work to be done.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Wasn't meant in any negative way, just ESL.
| consumer451 wrote:
| I did not see this coming. Wow. The game of thrones in SV.
|
| I wonder what happened with the OpenAI deal. Anyone have any
| guesses? My first guess is "Look at Claude Code, we can do this
| ourselves." But, I am likely thinking too simply.
|
| edit: does this mean that Windsurf and its users will stop being
| iced-out by Anthropic? Or, is this the end of Windsurf?
| consumer451 wrote:
| Derp. Weird IP sharing issues.
| imiric wrote:
| > I did not see this coming. Wow. The game of thrones in SV.
|
| You must be new around here.
| wagwang wrote:
| All of this game of thrones is going to create an amazing
| documentary if AI capabilities taper off and valuations vaporize.
| tamersalama wrote:
| Are the AI capabilities tapering-off, or commoditized? Building
| the next Windsurf (iteration 0) doesn't feel it's quite niche
| anymore.
| wagwang wrote:
| I think the current valuations imply at least 2 magnitudes of
| improvement over existing functionality.
| h1fra wrote:
| I know David Fincher is jumping on his seat
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| Obviously these things are difficult to tell from the outside
| xyst wrote:
| Apparently somebody missed crypto mania between 2019-2022
| sothatsit wrote:
| AI has nothing in common with crypto other than it being
| hyped a lot. The better comparison is the dot-com bubble.
| koolba wrote:
| > AI has nothing in common with crypto other than it being
| hyped a lot.
|
| Don't forget all the GPUs. Nvidia always gets its cut.
| sothatsit wrote:
| How did I forget about the GPUs! I have made a grave
| mistake, please forgive me.
| lionkor wrote:
| Well it's also being slammed into everything everywhere,
| its just more useful so it has even more places where it's
| being put
| asdev wrote:
| Gary-Marcus-eating-popcorn.gif
| zer00eyz wrote:
| > if AI capabilities taper off
|
| AI growth has slowed to a crawl, and it's priced it self out vs
| cost of compute.
|
| NVIDIA feels a lot like SUN.
|
| > amazing documentary
|
| Been there, done that: 2001, Startup Dot Com
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cP4PGjnZwJE
| seydor wrote:
| If by Documentary, you mean a new Silicon Valley sitcom, yes ,
| all the ingredients are there: The AGI believers, the doomers,
| the "cure all diseases" people, the board drama, the money
| grabbers, the VC dance , the poaching, the lawsuits for
| copyrights ... there s a whole new universe of caricatures
| sinenomine wrote:
| Even a very risky attempt at "cure all diseases" is worth all
| this economic upheaval, though.
|
| And AI applied to biomedicine arguably already delivered some
| acceleration.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| Pour one out for the regular employees _not_ getting absorbed by
| Google and suddenly not millionaires like they imagined they were
| a week ago.
| plumeria wrote:
| Like in WeCrashed (2022)?
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| Maybe the expectation that a job leading to an equity windfall
| is something people should be more cautious about.
| gsibble wrote:
| It's something you should never assume is true until the wire
| hits your account. I had a deal where I was going to make $15
| million called off 36 hours before closing.
| kirlev wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20250711213611/https://www.theve...
| metadat wrote:
| It's another Character.ai situation [0]. Unfortunate for any
| employees who aren't founders or researchers, as they don't get
| any payout or a nice new job from this exit structure. In fact
| they lose their whole time invested at the company.
|
| What a harsh time to work for an AI startup as a rank and file
| employee! I wonder how the founders justify going along with it
| inside their mind.
|
| [0] _Character.ai CEO Noam Shazeer Returns to Google_
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41141112 - 11 months ago (87
| comments)
|
| _Edit:_ Thank you @jonny_eh for the clarification. I can 't
| imagine it feels awesome being a leftover but at least you vested
| out. "Take the money and leave" is still a bit raw when the
| founders and researchers are now getting the initial payout +
| generous Google RSU's.
| takklz wrote:
| The rank and file equity pitch is quickly falling apart...
| bix6 wrote:
| Always has been
| bravetraveler wrote:
| Think it started that way... I'm currently in a
| vesting/allocation situation where the incentive is to drive
| the share price _down_.
| takklz wrote:
| Geeeeeze
| silenced_trope wrote:
| This.
|
| Character.ai reached out to me for an opportunity, but
| they've already been carved up.
|
| I think it's great that the rank and file got some of their
| equity cash-out (based on the other comment), but I imagine
| it isn't an attractive prospect as a start-up to join at this
| point.
|
| I just ignored the recruiter. I can't imagine their would be
| a second liquidity event.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| The "leftover" employees at Character were NOT screwed over.
| Options were converted to cash at the deal's valuation.
|
| Hopefully Windsurf employees are treated well here.
|
| Note: I worked at Character until recently.
| _jab wrote:
| On the flipside, I'm pretty sure the investors got screwed.
| jonas21 wrote:
| The investors made money too. The valuation at the last
| round was $1B, and Google paid them out at a valuation of
| $2.5B as part of the agreement [1].
|
| [1] https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/2/24212348/google-
| hires-char...
| blitzar wrote:
| 2.5x in 10 months. With returns like that - if I were the
| full time chef of the investors spare private jet I would
| be updating my CV and looking for a new gig.
| a5seo wrote:
| That's a deep burn.
| blitzar wrote:
| The full time masseuse should be able to help with that.
| jansan wrote:
| To quote an analyst from the Dotcom bubble era:
| "Everbody's happy, everybody's making money, something's
| wrong here"
| jonas21 wrote:
| This is how it's supposed to work. Nobody has to get
| screwed. It's not a zero-sum game.
| helloericsf wrote:
| Honestly depends on when they got in. Seed investors?
| They're probably fine with their preferences. Series B and
| beyond? That's where it gets messy. What round you
| thinking?
| dilyevsky wrote:
| It's literally the opposite - seed investors get paid
| last with the exception of common.
| LilBytes wrote:
| Hopefully. The world is healing.
| gowld wrote:
| Whose cash? OpenAI isn't paying, and Google isn't paying, and
| Windsurf investors already paid.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| I wasn't referring to Windsurf. But if there was no cash
| involved here, then ya, the employees were screwed. Do we
| know that's the case though?
| ipsum2 wrote:
| Not really true, I believe the "acquiring" (i.e. Google)
| company buys some equity from the employees (windsurf).
|
| Edit: the people downvoting this clearly can't read, I made the
| exact same point as jonny_eh.
| gowld wrote:
| The acquisition of Windsurf was cancelled.
| cavisne wrote:
| Instead they are paying 2.4B to "license" windsurfs IP.
| Still a loss vs OpenAI but at least the employees will get
| cash not openai stock.
| pydry wrote:
| This might be the beginning of the end of tech VC startups in
| general.
|
| High interest rates make VC funding more expensive and now
| bigtech can swoop in, poach all the necessary staff and deprive
| investors of an exit.
|
| What is the point any more?
| lsllc wrote:
| Isn't there not some contractual agreement between the VCs
| and the founders? (I understand that a non-compete might not
| apply [in CA], but taking VC money is a little different that
| simply getting hired).
|
| Were I a Windsurf investor, I'd be pissed right now and
| calling my lawyer.
| tlogan wrote:
| The low level employees are screwed. Basically they lost
| their job. Not cool.
| wadefletch wrote:
| the founder is on a vesting schedule set with the vc.
| walking away forfeits his ownership in the company (not
| sure of the specifics of this weird deal, but this is true
| in 99% of situations) which returns his ownership to the
| VCs either directly or functionally.
|
| the only reason he'd walk away is because he thinks other
| opportunities are higher EV. if he believes this, a) the
| investors investment is likely worth virtually 0 anyway and
| b) if it's not, removing a leader who doesn't want to be
| there probably increases P(success) for the company and
| further increases the value of the investment.
|
| founder departure isn't good for the narrative, but it's a
| symptom of an investment going bad, not often a cause.
| lsllc wrote:
| Presumably the founder(s) is/are getting a better deal by
| walking away in this case. If they've been through a few
| round of funding, they may have been diluted to the point
| when this sort of exit is better (for them).
| se4u wrote:
| FYI, It wasn't taken the money and leave, a lot of them got
| absorbed into GDM.
|
| Source: I was in GDM when character was acquired.
| metadat wrote:
| Do you mean Google Deep Mind? Curious what use deep mind had
| for the leftovers (kubernetes and web scraping experts, etc)?
|
| Otherwise why not merge all of engineering into ElGoog?
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Unfortunate for any employees who aren't founders or
| researchers, as they don't get any payout or a nice new job
| from this exit structure. In fact they lose their whole time
| invested at the company.
|
| Windsurf's value didn't go to $0 overnight. The company will
| continue and their equity is likely still worth a decent amount
| wherever the company ends up.
|
| Obviously a disappointing outcome for the people who thought
| life changing money was right around the corner, but they
| didn't lose everything.
| cavisne wrote:
| Just like with Character I'm assuming the employees get
| something. Whatever nonsense "licensing" fee Google is paying
| to not cause an antitrust investigation should be paid out
| straight to employees
| ipnon wrote:
| The general character of capital markets is to pay as little
| as possible. Otherwise you lose out to those who are more
| ruthless. It is plausible that Windsurf employees really are
| getting very little value for their work. We need to see
| details of the deal.
| tjwebbnorfolk wrote:
| > I wonder how the founders justify going along with it
|
| $2.4 billion.
| metadat wrote:
| This reads like a Dr. Evil plot.
| Henchman21 wrote:
| Everything since ~2016 reads like a Dr. Evil plot! I swear
| it feels like the world is getting dumber around me.
| metadat wrote:
| 100% agreed.
|
| You've reminded me of when I first watched Idiocracy in
| 2006. At the time, I delighted in the comedic,
| sophomoreish, and seemingly ridiculous take on a possible
| trajectory of humanity. But now much of it is actually
| coming to pass. It's sad.
|
| P.s. As a sidenote, apparently I love all of Mike Judge's
| productions, which also includes Office Space, and Beavis
| and Butthead.
| sampton wrote:
| Zuck swoops in and hire them 100mm a piece.
| baal80spam wrote:
| I really think that Apple is smart to sideline this shitshow.
| raspasov wrote:
| This.
| metadat wrote:
| https://archive.today/urwCT
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| What is the source Verge? Give us a link more than "Google and
| Windsurf announced Friday"
| asdev wrote:
| I never knew anyone who used Windsurf. These AI acquisitions have
| been unbelievable(in a bad way). WIX acquired some garbage
| Lovable.dev clone for 80 million. I think many of us are waiting
| for this bubble to pop(economy will likely pop too)
| sunaookami wrote:
| It was barely better than Cursor and they got shafted by
| Anthropic because of the takeover announcement so nobody really
| used it anymore because let's face it - Claude Sonnet is just
| the best coding model. Design-wise the chat panel and
| autocomplete integration was a bit nicer than in Cursor but not
| by much. Subscription for Windsurf was/is also 5$ cheaper.
| break_the_bank wrote:
| i don't think it was better than or comparable to cursor at
| all. except for the month prior to the OpenAI Acquisition
| news where some minor influencers on X were calling it
| better.
|
| if it was better it would have survived.
| buzzerbetrayed wrote:
| > if it was better it would have survived.
|
| Not sure how you can claim this when:
|
| 1. It is still very much alive, and
|
| 2. The whole point GP is making is that what made it better
| got stripped from it _because_ of the acquisition
| announcement
| cellis wrote:
| Base44 is absolutely not garbage. I've tried it and can say
| it's as good or better of a vibe-builder than Lovable or Bolt.
| Have you benchmarked it against the competition or can you
| otherwise substantiate the "garbage" claim? FWIW I do know one
| amazing engineer using Windsurf
| asdev wrote:
| all those projects are garbage and just create half bake
| prototypes that never see the light of day
| cellis wrote:
| Agree in principle, but when evaluated against the
| competition and likely acquisition targets of Wix, it's
| certainly not _garbage_. I 've seen it vibe code an entire
| app that was -- admittedly mostly working -- and deploy it
| with a prompt of 5 words, in about 2 minutes.
| raincole wrote:
| Well I use Windsurf. It's a good alternative to GitHub Copilot.
| The free tier is on par with Copilot's paid plan.
|
| ...which no one talks about anymore. Okay I guess you have a
| point.
| manquer wrote:
| Everyone has a niche, Windsurf is the only large provider if
| you are a Jetbrains shop.
|
| There are some alternatives like continue.dev or Jetbrains own
| AI offering but no Cursor or Claude Code ( Sonnet 3.7/4) you
| can get through Jetbrains plugin or others, but Anthropic does
| not provide support same with cursor.
| agnokapathetic wrote:
| claude code has a Jetbrains plugin which is delightful!
| manquer wrote:
| Seems a recent launch in beta just in June .
|
| Thanks for the share !
| paulbgd wrote:
| Check out sweep. Completely unaffiliated, their only offering
| is the jetbrains plugin so it gets a lot more focus than
| windsurf. Only downside is that Claude code is still a better
| agent, but at least its tab complete is some of the best
| rafaelmn wrote:
| GitHub copilot now has agents in jetbrain (not sure about
| stable - my nightly does).
|
| Jetbrains Junie is supposedly the same thing but no Rider and
| that's my current project so didn't get into that yet.
|
| Windsurf was just disappointingly bad in intellij (like any
| other plugin I've tried so far)
| allertonm wrote:
| The copilot agent stuff in IntelliJ works relatively well
| in my experience, they managed to implement a quite cursor-
| like "accept/reject" UI in a plugin, you know, forking
| IDEA. There are some areas like getting it to use git tools
| where cursor works more smoothly but you can coax Copilot
| into producing the same results. I'm just generally happier
| working in IntelliJ vs VSCode so I've tended to favour
| Copilot.
|
| Never tried Windsurf in it's recent form but we did
| evaluate it when it was still called Codeium and everyone
| liked Copilot better.
| sschueller wrote:
| Jetbrain's Junie works incredibly well. I much prefer it over
| cursor's or continue's UI.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| What does it offer that's better than running CC with
| Pycharm/Jetbrains?
| iammrpayments wrote:
| The first time they hit the news, I've tried to open their
| website to see what it was all about and it froze my phone lol
| sumedh wrote:
| I was on Windsurf's grandfather $10 per month plan, it was
| really good during the Sonnet 3.5 and 3.7 days
|
| I am still a paid subscriber but most of my usage is claude
| code now becaue Windsurf does not Sonnet 4 included in their
| plan.
| Fethbita wrote:
| Windsurf was also used by enterprises because of their on-prem
| plan. They gutted that after OpenAI acquisition was announced
| and since then I am sure none of those enterprises that used it
| will switch to their cloud offering and look for other venues.
| upmind wrote:
| Does anyone know which side cancelled the deal?
| lvl155 wrote:
| OpenAI needs to up their game on Codex to be on par with Claude
| Code. o3 is a better planner relative to Opus.
| beering wrote:
| Where do you think Codex lags behind Claude Code?
| romanovcode wrote:
| The big one is that they do not offer "unlimited" plans where
| you can forget about the tokens and just use it.
|
| UI is also worse compared to Claude.
|
| They still have some work to do if they want to compete with
| Claude TBH.
| WeirderScience wrote:
| I wonder if this is a result of the previously reported clashes
| between OpenAI and Microsoft over access to the Windsurf IP
| (under their investment agreement)
| ghuntley wrote:
| For the love of God, can we get a reboot of the Silicon Valley
| television show? Just on AI. Like when they wrapped it, they
| wrapped it on AI usage. So, it's got the perfect arc for a reboot
| that focuses perfectly on AI.
| beering wrote:
| Even the original Silicon Valley didn't match the zaniness of
| real life. Why do we need a reboot? Just check HN!
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| My favorite thing about that series was watching it with
| friends who weren't from the Bay Area. Often they'd be
| laughing at the sheer absurdity of a situation, and I'd get
| to point out that it was barely exaggerated from real life.
| gsibble wrote:
| That's what my friends not from SF said. "This is insane,
| this would never happen"
|
| Dude, I saw a lot crazier things happen on a monthly basis.
| And don't even get me started on the personal lives and
| partying that the show didn't display.
| timy2shoes wrote:
| My wife refuses to watch it because it hit too close to
| home.
| seydor wrote:
| Why ? we get to watch the original reality show in real time,
| for free!
| mizzao wrote:
| The "Son of Anton" was an coding agent that deleted the entire
| codebase. Not so far off from Cursor's YOLO mode, is it?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44262383
| xyst wrote:
| C-level executives get paid. Labor gets stuck grinding at Google.
| What a waste. Google will probably shelve/hoard the IP from
| Windsurf.
| bhl wrote:
| I don't know anyone who heard or used Windsurf outside the Bay
| Area. Even Cursor feels very Bay Area bubbly (although that is
| the market to go after if you're in ai dev tools).
| jongjong wrote:
| Cursor does add value but it's just a thin layer on top of
| VSCode so companies could just build that in-house and don't
| need to acquire. There's no moat there.
| bhl wrote:
| Cursor has custom tab and embedding models. And has a lot of
| distribution / paying users already.
|
| Arguably they have the strongest product moat, and I wouldn't
| be surprised if they beat OpenAI in a vertical coding model
| from that. Easy for them to have users generate evals and
| have model product feedback loop here.
| bn-l wrote:
| The tab completion is fast and the best available right now
| but is still so garbage that I turn it off 99% of the time
| because the suggestions are mostly noise.
| anon7000 wrote:
| I have the opposite experience, it's at least 90%
| correct. For example, if I start writing the name of a
| function that I just added in a different file, tab will
| suggest the function, then jump to the top of the file to
| import it. If I'm changing the way something is called in
| 5 places, if I change it in the first place, tab will
| jump to make the same change in the other places. It's
| honestly pretty spot on.
|
| Zed tab is a lot worse in comparison (partly because it's
| slow)
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| Before being known as Windsurf it was Codeium - the only good
| free autocomplete extension for VS Code and Jetbrains ides.
| layer8 wrote:
| According to The Information, Microsoft gaining access to
| Windsurf's IP if OpenAI acquired them was a factor:
| https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-windsurf-brea...
| (paywalled)
| modeless wrote:
| I don't understand why Windsurf would care after they've
| exited.
| gk1 wrote:
| Not Windsurf... OpenAI. And OpenAI cares because they're
| competing (in part) against Copilot, so if Msoft gets all the
| benefits of Windsurf then OpenAI would effectively be paying
| 3B to feed their competitor.
| modeless wrote:
| This would also happen if OpenAI developed the same thing
| internally, right? I don't see how not acquiring them
| improves anything.
| cornfieldlabs wrote:
| I guess building it internally is cheaper
| subarctic wrote:
| Does that ip deal expire at some point?
| Maxious wrote:
| Only if OpenAI declares they have achieved AGI.
| extr wrote:
| IMO other than the Microsoft IP issue, I think the biggest thing
| that has shifted since this acquisition was first in the works is
| Claude Code has absolutely exploded. Forking an IDE and all the
| expense that comes with that feels like a waste of effort,
| considering the number of free/open source CLI agentic tools that
| are out there.
|
| Let's review the current state of things:
|
| - Terminal CLI agents are several orders of magnitude less $$$ to
| develop than forking an entire IDE.
|
| - CC is dead simple to onboard (use whatever IDE you're using
| now, with a simple extension for some UX improvements).
|
| - Anthropic is free to aggressively undercut their own API
| margins (and middlemen like Cursor) in exchange for more
| predictable subscription revenue + training data access.
|
| What does Cursor/Windsurf offer over VS Code + CC?
|
| - Tab completion model (Cursor's remaining moat)
|
| - Some UI niceties like "add selection to chat", and etc.
|
| Personally I think this is a harbinger of where things are going.
| Cursor was fastest to $900M ARR and IMO will be fastest back down
| again.
| alanmoraes wrote:
| I never understood why those tools need to fork Visual Studio
| Code. Wouldn't an extension suffice?
| extr wrote:
| IIRC problem is that VS Code does not allow extensions to
| create custom UI in the panels areas except for WebViews(?).
| It makes for not a great experience. Plus Cursor does a lot
| with background indexing to make their tab completion model
| really good - more than would be possible with the extensions
| APIs available.
| efitz wrote:
| Cline and Roo Code (my favorite Cline fork) are fantastic and
| run as normal VS Code extensions.
|
| Occasionally they lose their connection to the terminal in
| VSCode, but I've got no other integration complaints.
|
| And I really prefer the bring-your-own-key model as opposed
| to letting the IDE be my middleman.
| milofeynman wrote:
| Using cline for a bit made me realize cursor was doomed.
| Everything is just a gpt/anthropic wrapper of fancy
| prompts.
|
| I can do most of what I want with cline, and I've gone back
| from large changes to just small changes and been moving
| much quicker. Large refactors/changes start to deviate from
| what you actually want to accomplish unless you have
| written a dissertation, and even then they fail.
| mehphp wrote:
| I agree with all you've said but with regards to writing
| a dissertation for larger changes : have you tried
| letting it first right a plan for you as markdown (just
| keep this file uncommitted) and then let it build a
| checklist of things to do?
|
| I find just referencing this file over and over works
| wonders and it respects items that were already checked
| off really well.
|
| I can get a lot done really fast this way in small enough
| chunks so i know every bit of code and how it works
| (tweaking manually of course where needed).
|
| But I can blow through some tickets way faster than
| before this way.
| lozenge wrote:
| When the Copilot extension needs a new VS Code feature it
| gets added, but it isn't available to third party extensions
| until months later... Err, years later... well, whenever
| Microsoft feels like it.
|
| So an extension will never be able to compete with Copilot.
| Maxious wrote:
| As part of this whole drama, the APIs that Copilot uses are
| being opened up https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2025/06
| /30/openSourceAIE...
| bn-l wrote:
| It was so they could close source it.
| justincormack wrote:
| You can ship clised source extensions
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| > Wouldn't an extension suffice?
|
| Not if you want custom UI. There are a lot of things you can
| do in extension land (continue, cline, roocode, kilocode,
| etc. are good examples) but there are some things you can't.
|
| One thing I would have thought would be really cool to try is
| to integrate it at the LSP level, and use all that good
| stuff, but apparently people trying (I think there was a
| company from .il trying) either went closed or didn't release
| anything note worthy...
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| I use Augment extensively and find it superior to cursor in
| every way - and operates as an extension. It has a really
| handy task planning interface and meta prompt refinement
| feature and the costs are remarkably low. The quality of
| output implantation is higher IMO and I don't have to do a
| lot of model selection and don't get Max model bill
| explosions. If there's something Cursor provided that Augment
| doesn't via extension it was not functionally useful enough
| to notice.
| atombender wrote:
| I think Augment has been flying under the radar for many
| people, and really reserve better marketing.
|
| I've been using Augment for over a year with IntelliJ, and
| never understood why my colleagues were all raving about
| Cursor and Windsurf. I gave Cursor a real try, but it
| wasn't any better, and the value proposition of having to
| adopt a dedicated IDE wasn't attractive to me.
|
| A plugin to leverage your existing tools makes a lot more
| sense than an IDE. Or at least until/if AI agents get so
| smart that you don't need most of the IDE's functionality,
| which might change what kinds of tooling are needed when
| you're in the passenger seat rather than the driver's seat.
| libraryofbabel wrote:
| Some excellent points. On "add selection to chat", I just want
| to add that the Claude Code VS code extension automatically
| passes the current selection to the model. :)
|
| I am genuinely curious if any Cursor or Windsurf users who have
| _also_ tried Claude Code could speak to why they prefer the
| IDE-fork tools? I've only ever used Claude Code myself - what
| am I missing?
| rhodysurf wrote:
| It already does this btw, when you use Cc from the vscode
| terminal and select things it adds it to cc context
| automatically
| greymalik wrote:
| As does Copilot
| extr wrote:
| Cursor's tab completion model is legitimately fantastic and
| for many people is worth the entire $20 subscription. Lint
| fixes or syntax-level refactors are guessed and executed
| instantly with TAB with close to 100% accuracy. This is their
| final moat IMO, if Copilot manages to bring their tab
| completion up to near parity, very little reason to use
| Cursor.
| conradkay wrote:
| <https://forum.cursor.com/t/i-made-59-699-lines-of-agent-
| edit...>
|
| It's quite interesting how little the Cursor power users
| use tab. Majority of the posts are some insane number of
| agent edits and close to (or exactly) 0 tabs.
| Jcampuzano2 wrote:
| At my company we have an enterprise subscription and
| we're also all allowed to see the analytics for the
| entire company. Last I checked, I was literally the
| number one user of Tab and middle of the pack for agent.
|
| It's interesting when I see videos or reddit posts about
| cursor and people getting rate limited and being super
| angry. In my experience tab is the number one feature,
| and I feel like most people using agent are probably
| overusing it tasks that would honestly take less time to
| do myself or using models way smarter than they need to
| be for the task at hand.
| cardanome wrote:
| I use cursor strictly for agent edits and do anything
| else in a proper IDE meaning in a Jetbrains product that
| I run in a separate window.
|
| Many of my co-workers do the same. VC Code is vastly
| inferior when it comes to editing and actual IDE feature
| so it is a non-starter when you do programming yourself.
|
| I once tried AI tab-complete on Zed and it was all right
| but breaks my flow. Either the AI does the editing or I
| do it but mixing both annoys me.
| breuleux wrote:
| I find tab extremely distracting and it was the first
| thing I turned off. I have no idea how people can
| tolerate it.
| olejorgenb wrote:
| Idk. When you're doing something it really gets it's super
| nice, but it's also off a lot of times and it's IMO super
| distracting when it constantly pop up. No way to explicitly
| request it instead - other than toggling, which seems to
| also turn off context/edit tracking, because after toggling
| on it does not suggest anything until you make some edits.
|
| While Zed's model is not as good the UI is so much better
| IMO.
| fipar wrote:
| Just to offer a different perspective, I use Cursor at work
| and, coming from emacs (which I still use) with copilot
| completions only when I request them with a shortcut,
| Cursor's behavior drives me crazy.
| MkLouis wrote:
| Which Emacs Package do you use for CoPilot, i tried using
| Copilot.el a long while ago, but had problems with it. Is
| there something new or does copilot.el fulfill your
| needs?
| groggo wrote:
| I haven't used Cursor or Claude much, how different is it
| from Copilot? I bounce between desktop ChatGPT (which can
| update VS Code) and copilot. Is there an impression that
| those have fallen behind?
| mdaniel wrote:
| IME, one of execution. Copilot is like having your cousin
| who works at Bestbuy try and help you code - it knows
| what a computer is, and speaks english, but is pretty bad
| at both
|
| The story I've heard is that Cursor is making all their
| money on context management and prompting, to help smooth
| over the gap between "you know what I meant" and getting
| the underlying model to "know what you meant"
|
| I haven't had as much experience with Claude or Claude
| Code to speak to those, but my colleagues speak of them
| highly
| coolspot wrote:
| Github Copilot just added that about a week ago.
| druskacik wrote:
| I'd like to ask the opposite question: why do people prefer
| command line tools? I tried both and I prefer working in IDE.
| The main reason is that I don't trust the LLMs too much and I
| like to see and potentially quickly edit the changes they
| make. With an IDE, I can iterate much faster than with the
| command line tool.
|
| I haven't tried Claude Code VS Code extension. Did anyone
| replaced Cursor with this setup?
| rapind wrote:
| You're looking at (coloured) diffs in your shell is all
| when it comes to coding. It's pretty easy to setup MCP and
| have claude be the director. Like I have zen MCP running
| with an OpenRouter API key, and will ask claude to consult
| with pro (gemini) or o3, or both to come up with an
| architecture review / plan.
|
| I honestly don't know how great that is, because it just
| reiterates what I was planning anyways, and I can't tell if
| it's just glazing, or it's just drawing the same general
| conclusions. Seriously though, it does a decent job, and
| you can discuss / ruminate over approaches.
|
| I assume you can do all the same things in an editor. I'm
| just comfortable with a shell is all, and as a hardcore Vi
| user, I don't really want to use Visual Studio.
| mat_b wrote:
| I also use vim heavily and I've found that I'm really
| enjoying Cursor + VS Code Vim extension. The cursor tab
| completion works very nicely in conjunction with vim
| navigate mode.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| JetBrains has CC integration where CC runs in a terminal
| window but uses the IDE (i.e., Pycharm) for diffing. Works
| well.
| mdaniel wrote:
| heh, including "for diffing" is selling short when our
| new job as software developers now seems to be
| _reviewing_ code, of which looking at a diff is only one
| tiny part. That goes infinitely more for dynamically
| typed languages, where there is no compiler to catch dumb
| typos. If I have to actually, no kidding, review code
| then I want all the introspections, find references, go
| to declaration, et al for catching the intern trying to
| cheat me
| princevegeta89 wrote:
| I replaced. My opinion: Cursor sucks as an IDE. Cursor may
| have a average to above average quality in IDE assistance -
| but the IDE seems to get in the way. It's entire
| performance is based on the real-time performance and
| latency from their servers and sometimes it is way too
| slow. The TAB autocomplete that was working for you in the
| last 30 minutes suddenly doesn't work randomly, or just
| experiences severe delays that it stops making sense.
|
| Besides that, the IDE seems poorly designed - some
| navigation options are confusing and it makes way too many
| intrusive changes (ex: automatically finishing strings).
|
| I've since gone back to VS Code - with Cline (with
| OpenRouter and super cheap Qwen Coder models, Windsurf
| FREE, Claude Code with $20 per month) and I get great
| mileage from all of them.
| sunnybeetroot wrote:
| I can roll back to different checkpoints with Cursor easily.
| Maybe CC has it but the fact that I haven't found it after
| using it daily is an example of Cursor having a better UX for
| me.
| handfuloflight wrote:
| Or Cursor just gave him a better deal?
| macrolime wrote:
| I like using Claude Code through Roo Code (vscode extension).
| I find it easier to work with text using a mouse, vscode diff
| viewer etc. I guess if you're very good at vim shortcuts etc
| you can use that in Claude Code instead of selecting text
| with a mouse. Claude Code has a vscode extension too so I
| feel that using Claude Code through vscode just adds a better
| UI.
| wagwang wrote:
| As far as I can tell, terminal agents are inferior to hosted
| agents in sandboxed/imaged environments when it comes to
| concurrent execution and far inferior to assisted ide in terms
| of UX so what exactly is the point?. The "UI niceties" is the
| whole point of using cursor and somehow, everyone else sucks at
| it.
| rhodysurf wrote:
| You're missing the point tho. The point of the cli agent is
| that it's a building block to put this thing everywhere. Look
| at CCs GitHub plugin, it's great
| wagwang wrote:
| CC on github just looks like Codex. I see your point, but
| it seems like all the big players basically have a CLI
| agent and most of them think that its just an
| implementation detail so they dont expose it.
| extr wrote:
| Not sure what you mean. "Hosted agents in sandboxed/imaged
| environments"? The entire selling point of CC is that you can
| do
|
| - > curl -fsSL http://claude.ai/install.sh | bash
|
| - > claude
|
| - > OAuth to your Anthropic account
|
| Done. Now you have a SOTA agentic AI with pretty forgiving
| usage limits up and running immediately. This is why it's
| capturing developer mindshare. The simplicity of getting up
| and going with it is a selling point.
| gk1 wrote:
| Plus it's straightforward to make Claude Code run agents in
| parallel/background just like Codex and Cursor, in local
| sandboxes: https://github.com/dagger/container-use
| adamoshadjivas wrote:
| Agreed on everything. Just to add, not only anthropic is
| offering CC at like a 500% loss, they restricted sonnet/opus 4
| access to windsurf, and jacked up their enterprise deal to
| Cursor. The increase in price was so big that it forced cursor
| to make that disastrous downgrade to their plans.
|
| I think only way Cursor and other UX wrappers still win is if
| on device models or at least open source models catch up in the
| next 2 years. Then i can see a big push for UX if models are
| truly a commodity. But as long as claude is much better then
| yes they hold all the cards. (And don't have a bigger company
| to have a civil war with like openai)
| virgildotcodes wrote:
| Seems like the survival strategy for cursor would be to
| develop their own frontier coding model. Maybe they can
| leverage the data from their still somewhat significant lead
| in the space to make a solid effort.
| libraryofbabel wrote:
| I don't think that's a viable strategy. It is very very
| hard and not many people can do it. Just look at how much
| Meta is paying to poach the few people in the world capable
| of training a next gen frontier model.
| lukan wrote:
| Why are there actually only a few people in the world
| able to do this?
|
| The basic concept is out there.
|
| Lots of smart people studying hard to catch up to also be
| poached. No shortage of those I assume.
|
| Good trainingsdata still seems the most important to me.
|
| (and lots of hardware)
|
| Or does the specific training still involves lots of
| smart decisions all the time?
|
| And those small or big decisions make all the difference?
| phillipcarter wrote:
| I'd recommend reading some of the papers on what it takes
| to actually train a proper foundation model, such as the
| Llama 3 Herd of Models paper. It is a deeply
| sophisticated process.
|
| Coding startups also try to fine-tune OSS models to their
| own ends. But this is also very difficult, and usually
| just done as a cost optimization, not as a way to get
| _better_ functionality.
| sideshownz wrote:
| 1. Cost to hire is now prohibitive. You're competing
| against companies like Meta paying tens of millions for
| top talent.
|
| 2. Cost to train is also prohibitive. Grok data centre
| has 200,000 H100 Graphics cards. Impossible for a startup
| to compete with this.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| "Impossible for a startup to compete with this."
|
| its funny to me since xAI literally the "youngest" in
| this space and recently made an Grok4 that surpass all
| frontier model
|
| it literally not impossible
| lukan wrote:
| I mean, that's a startup backed by the richest man in the
| world who also was engaged with OpenAI in the beginning.
|
| I assume startup here means the average one, that has a
| little bit less of funding and connections.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| so is Meta(fb) and Apple but that doesn't seem to be the
| case
|
| money is "less" important factor, I don't say they don't
| matters but much less than you would think
| ascorbic wrote:
| The richest man in the world, who could also divert the
| world's biggest GPU order from his other company
| ako wrote:
| Most startups don't have Elon Musk's money.
| re-thc wrote:
| xAI isn't young. The brand, maybe. Not the actual history
| / timeline. Tesla was working on AI long ago.
|
| xAI was just spun out to raise more money / fix the x
| finance issues.
| libraryofbabel wrote:
| The basic concept plus a lot of money spent on compute
| and training data gets you pretraining. After that to get
| a really good model there's a lot more fine-tuning / RL
| steps that companies are pretty secretive about. That is
| where the "smart decisions" and knowledge gained by
| training previous generations of sota models comes in.
|
| We'd probably see more companies training their own
| models if it was cheaper, for sure. Maybe some of them
| would do very well. But even having a lot of money to
| throw at this doesn't guarantee success, e.g. Meta's
| Llama 4 was a big disappointment.
|
| That said, it's not impossible to catch up to close to
| state-of-the-art, as Deepseek showed.
| riwsky wrote:
| Because it's not about "who can do it", it's about "who
| can do it the best".
|
| It's the difference between running a marathon
| (impressive) and winning a marathon (here's a giant
| sponsorship check).
| seanhunter wrote:
| Why are there so few people in the world able to run 100m
| in sub 10s?
|
| The basic concept is out there: run very fast.
|
| Lots of people running every day who could be poached. No
| shortage of those I assume.
|
| Good running shoes still seem the most important to me.
| vachina wrote:
| You need a person that can hit the ground running.
| Compute for LLM is extremely capital intensive and you're
| always racing against time. Missing performance targets
| can mean life or death of the company.
| raincole wrote:
| > to develop their own frontier coding model
|
| Uh, the irony is that this is exactly what Windsurf tried.
| stogot wrote:
| Why did they fail?
| jonny_eh wrote:
| It's both hard AND expensive.
| josephcooney wrote:
| interestingly windsurf have done this (I'm not sure how
| frontier this model is...but it's their own model)
| https://windsurf.com/blog/windsurf-wave-9-swe-1 but AFAIK
| cursor have not.
| teruakohatu wrote:
| > CC at like a 500% loss
|
| Do you have a citation for this?
|
| It might be at a loss, but I don't think it is that
| extravagant.
| resonious wrote:
| I'm also curious about this. Claude Code feels very
| expensive to me, but at the same time I don't have much
| perspective (nothing to compare it to, really, other than
| Codex or other agent editors I guess. And CC is way better
| so likely worth the extra money anyway)
| harikb wrote:
| I think GP is talking about Claude Code Max 100 & 200
| plans. They are very reasonable compared to anything else
| that has per-use token usage.
|
| I am on Max and I can work 5 hrs+ a day easily. It does
| fall back to Sonnet pretty fast, but I don't seem to
| notice any big differece.
| e1g wrote:
| Yes, my CC usage is regularly $50-$100 _per day_ , so
| their Max plan is absolutely great value that I don't
| expect to last.
| jhickok wrote:
| Can you give me an idea of how much interaction would be
| $50-$100 per day? Like are you pretty constantly in a
| back and forth with CC? And if you wouldn't mind, any
| chance you can give me an idea of productivity gains
| pre/post LLM?
| resonious wrote:
| Re productivity gains, CC allows me to code during my
| commute time. Even on a crowded bus/train I can get real
| work done just with my phone.
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| Unless you're getting paid for your commute, you're just
| giving your employer free productivity. I would recommend
| doing literally anything else with that time. Read a
| book, maybe.
| resonious wrote:
| It's for a paid side gig.
| positr0n wrote:
| Everywhere I've worked as a programmer you're just paid
| to do your job. If you get some of it done on your
| commute what difference does it make?
| ReaLNero wrote:
| What's your workflow if I may ask? I've been interested
| in the idea as well.
| resonious wrote:
| The project is just a web backend. I give Claude Code
| grunt work tasks. Things like "make X operation also
| return Y data" or "create Z new model + CRUD operations".
| Also asking it to implement well-known patterns like
| denouncing or caching for an existing operation works
| well.
|
| My app builds and runs fine on Termux, so my CLAUDE.md
| says to always run unit tests after making changes. So I
| punch in a request, close my phone for a bit, then check
| back later and review the diff. Usually takes one or two
| follow-up asks to get right, but since it always builds
| and passes tests, I never get complete garbage back.
|
| There are some tasks that I never give it. Most of that
| is just intuition. Anything I need to understand deeply
| or care about the implementation of I do myself. And the
| app was originally hand-built by me, which I think is
| important - I would not trust CC to design the entire
| thing from scratch. It's much easier to review changes
| when you understand the overall architecture deeply.
| dwohnitmok wrote:
| How do you use Claude Code via your phone?
| manmal wrote:
| vibetunnel.sh perhaps
| macrolime wrote:
| Personally I use dev containers on a server and I have
| written some template containers for quickly setting up
| new containers that has claude code and some scripts for
| easily connecting to the right container etc. Makes it
| possible to work on mobile,but lots of room for
| improvement in the workflow still.
| e1g wrote:
| Yes, _a lot_ of usage, I'd guess top 10% among my peers.
| I do 6-10hrs of constant iterating across mid-size
| codebases of 750k tokens. CC is set to use Opus by
| default, which further drives up costs.
|
| Estimating productivity gains is a flame war I don't want
| to start, but as a signal: if the CC Max plan goes up 10x
| in price, I'm still keeping my subscription.
|
| I maintain top-tier subscription to every frontier
| service (~$1k/mo) and throughout the week spend multiple
| hours with each of Cursor, Amp, Augment, Windsurf, Codex
| CLI, Gemini CLI, but keep on defaulting to Claude Code.
| foolishgame wrote:
| I am curious what kind of code development you are doing
| with so many subscriptions?
|
| Are you doing front end backend full stack or model
| development itself?
|
| Are you destilling models for training your own?
|
| I have never heard someone using so much subscription?
|
| Is this for your full time job or startup?
|
| Why not use qwen or deep seek and host it yourself?
|
| I am impressed with what you are doing.
| e1g wrote:
| I'm a founder/CTO of an enterprise SaaS, and I code
| everything from data modeling, to algos, backend
| integrations, frontend architecture, UI widgets, etc. All
| in TypeScript, which is perfectly suited to LLMs because
| we can fit the types and repo map into context without
| loading all code.
|
| As to "why": I've been coding for 25 years, and LLMs is
| the first technology that has a non-linear impact on my
| output. It's simultaneously moronic and jaw-dropping. I'm
| good at what I do (eg, merged fixes into Node) and
| Claude/o3 regularly finds material edge cases in my code
| that I was confident in. Then they add a test case (as
| per our style), write a fix, and update docs/examples
| within two minutes.
|
| I love coding and the art&craft of software development.
| I've written millions of lines of revenue generating
| code, and made millions doing it. If someone forced me to
| stop using LLMs in my production process, I'd quit on the
| spot.
|
| Why not self host: open source models are a generation
| behind SOTA. R1 is just not in the same league as the pro
| commercial models.
| atonse wrote:
| > If someone forced me to stop using LLMs in my
| production process, I'd quit on the spot.
|
| Yup 100% agree. I'd rather try to convince them of the
| benefits than go back to what feels like an unnecessarily
| inefficient process of writing all code by hand again.
|
| And I've got 25+ years of solid coding experience. Never
| going back.
| ineedasername wrote:
| When you say generation behind, can you give a sense of
| what that means in functionality per your current use?
| Slower/lower quality, it would take more iterations to
| get what you want?
| sebastianz wrote:
| > data modeling, to algos, backend integrations, frontend
| architecture, UI widgets, etc. All in TypeScript, which
| is perfectly suited to LLMs because we can fit the types
| and repo map into context without loading all code.
|
| Which frameworks & libraries have you found work well in
| this (agentic) context? I feel much of the js lib.
| landscape does not do enough to enforce an easily-
| understood project structure that would "constrain" the
| architecture and force modularity. (I might have this
| bias from my many years of work with Rails that is highly
| opinionated in this regard).
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| > I've written millions of lines of revenue generating
| code
|
| This is a wild claim.
|
| Approx 250 working days in a year. 25 years coding. Just
| one million lines would be phenom output, at 160 lines
| per day _forever_. Now you are claiming multiple
| millions? Come on.
| codedokode wrote:
| 100-200 lines per day, written, debugged, tested and
| deployed, is normal performance, isn't it? I think I
| could do it if worked for 8 hours.
| klardotsh wrote:
| No, it's not. At all. At the overwhelming majority of
| companies I've worked for or heard of, even 400-500 lines
| fully shipped in a week, slightly less than your figure
| here, would be top quartile of output - but further, it
| isn't necessarily the point. Writing lines of code is a
| pretty small part of the job at companies with more than
| about 5-6 engineers on staff, past that it's a lot more
| design and architecture and LEGO-brick-fitting - or just
| politicking and policying. Heck, I know folks who wish
| they could ship 400 lines of code _a month_ , but are
| held back by the bureaucracies of their companies.
| ohdeargodno wrote:
| Uh... Totaling +1000 at the end of a work week is an easy
| thing to do, especially if working on a new/evolving
| product.
| kortilla wrote:
| Now extrapolate. That's maybe 50k a year assuming some
| PTO.
|
| 10 years would make 500k and you just cross a million at
| 20.
|
| So that would have to be 20 years straight of that style
| of working and you're still not into plural millions
| until 40 years.
|
| If someone actually produced multiple millions of lines
| in 25 years, it would have to be a side effect of some
| extremely verbose language where trivial changes take up
| many lines (maybe Java).
| fourthark wrote:
| Maybe there's some copying and pasting involved. ;-)
| drbojingle wrote:
| Just fitting types and repo map into context eh? That's
| great. Any other tips?
| chris_engel wrote:
| i've been using llm-based tools like copilot and claude
| pro (though not cc with opus), and while they can be
| helpful - e.g. for doc lookups, repetitive stuff, or
| quick reminders - i rarely get value beyond that. i've
| honestly never had a model surface a bug or edge case i
| wouldn't have spotted myself.
|
| i've tried agent-style workflows in copilot and windsurf
| (on claude 3.5 and 4), and honestly, they often just get
| stuck or build themselves into a corner. they don't seem
| to reason across structure or long-term architecture in
| any meaningful way. it might look helpful at first, but
| what comes out tends to be fragile and usually something
| i'd refactor immediately.
|
| sure, the model writes fast - but that speed doesn't
| translate into actual productivity for me unless it's
| something dead simple. and if i'm spending a lot of time
| generating boilerplate, i usually take that as a design
| smell, not a task i want to automate harder.
|
| so i'm honestly wondering: is cc max really that much
| better? are those productivity claims based on something
| fundamentally different? or is it more about tool
| enthusiasm + selective wins?
| jhickok wrote:
| Thank you for your perspective. I've been staring at
| Claude Code for a bit and I think I will just pull the
| trigger.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| It's a wild frontier, but as a recent convert to CC, I
| would say go for it.
|
| It's so stupid fast to get running that you aren't out
| anything if you don't like it.
|
| There was no way I was going to switch to a different
| IDE.
| jonstewart wrote:
| I am curious what kind of development you're doing and
| where your projects fall on the fast
| iteration<->correctness curve (no judgment). I've used CC
| Pro for a few weeks now and I will keep it, it's
| fantastically useful for some things, but it has wasted
| more of my time than it saved when I've experimented with
| giving it harder tasks.
| brailsafe wrote:
| It's interesting to work with a number of people using
| various models and interaction modes in slightly
| different capacities. I can see where the huge
| productivity gains are and can feel them, but the same is
| true for the opposite. I'm pretty sure I lost a full day
| or more trying to track down a build error because it was
| relatively trivial fpr someone to ask CC or something to
| refactor a ton of files, which it seems to have done a
| bit too eagerly. On the other hand, that refactor would
| have been super tedious, so maybe worth it?
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| Mostly to save money (I am retired) I mostly use Gemini
| APIs. I used to also use good open weight models on
| groq.com, but life is simpler just using Gemini.
|
| Ultimately, my not using the best tools for my personal
| research projects has zero effect on the world but I am
| still very curious what elite developers with the best
| tools can accomplish, and what capability I am 'leaving
| on the table.'
| mekpro wrote:
| you can easily reach 50$ per day. by force switching
| model to opus /model opus it will continue to use opus
| eventhough there is a warning about approaching limit.
|
| i found opus is significantly more capable in coding than
| sonnet, especcially for the task that is poorly defined,
| thinking mode can fulfill alot of missing detail and you
| just need to edit a little before let it code.
| upcoming-sesame wrote:
| wow. haven't tried Opus but Sonnet 4 is already damn
| good.
| AJ007 wrote:
| Pretty easy to hit $100 an hour using Opus on API
| credits. The model providers are heavily subsidized, the
| datacenters appear to be too. If you look at the
| Coreweave stuff and the private datacenters it starts
| looking like the telecom bubble. Even Meta is looking to
| finance datacenter expansion -
| https://www.reuters.com/business/meta-seeks-29-billion-
| priva...
|
| The reason they are talking about building new nuclear
| power plants in the US isn't just for a few training
| runs, its for inference. At scale the AI tools are going
| to be extremely expensive.
|
| Also note China produces twice as much electricity as the
| United States. Software development and agent demand is
| going to be competitive across industries. You may think,
| oh I can just use a few hours of this a day and I got a
| week of work done (happens to me some days), but you are
| going to end up needing to match what your competitors
| are doing - not what you got comfortable with. This is
| the recurring trap of new technology (no capitalism
| required.)
|
| There is a danger to independent developers becoming
| reliant on models. $100-$200 is a customer acquisition
| cost giveaway. The state of the art models probably will
| end up costing hourly what a human developer costs. There
| is also the speed and batching part. How willing is the
| developer to, for example, get 50% off but maybe wait
| twice as long for the output. Hopefully the good dev
| models end up only costing $1000-$2000 a month in a year.
| At least that will be more accessible.
|
| Somewhere in the future these good models will run on
| device and just cost the price of your hardware. Will it
| be the AGI models? We will find out.
|
| I wonder how this comment will age, will look back at it
| in 5 or 10 years.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| > Pretty easy to hit $100 an hour
|
| I don't see how that can be true, but if it is...
|
| Either you, or I are definitely use Claude Code
| incorrectly.
| shinycode wrote:
| It's definitely easy with an API key I hit 200$ in an
| evening. I didn't think that could be possible.
| Horrifying
| DANmode wrote:
| To be clear, this is a lot of full-scale reading and
| (re)writing, without any rules, promots, "agents"/code to
| limit your resource usage, right?
|
| Nobody's asking for $200 in single-line diffs in less
| than a day - right?
| shinycode wrote:
| It's not about a single line diff but the same prompts
| with cursor does not end costing that much
| AJ007 wrote:
| Right, this is having Claude Code just running as an
| agent doing a lot of stuff. Also tool use is a big
| context hog here.
| macrolime wrote:
| This is around what what Cursor was costing me with
| Claude 4 Opus before I switched to Claude Code. Sonnet
| works fine for some things, but for some projects it
| spews unusable garbage, unless the specification is so
| detailed that it's almost the implementation already.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| > unless the specification is so detailed that it's
| almost the implementation already.
|
| You mean... it's almost exactly like working with interns
| and jr developers? ;)
| macrolime wrote:
| Yeah, it's like an idiot savant intern who has memorized
| all the API docs in the world, but still somehow
| struggles to work independently.
| manmal wrote:
| The SOTA models will always run in data centers, because
| they have 5x or more VRAM and 10-100x the compute
| allowance. Plus, they can make good use of scaling w/
| batch inference which is a huge power savings, and which
| a single developer machine doesn't make full use of.
| dostick wrote:
| Why "no capitalism required"? Competition of this kind is
| only possible with capitalism.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Not really, it's possible with any market economy, even a
| hypothetical socialist one (that is, one where all market
| actors are worker-owned co-ops).
|
| And, since there is no global super-state, the world
| economy is a market economy, so even if every state were
| a state-owned planned economy, North Korea style, still
| there would exist this type of competition between
| states.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| I mean, if you wanna get technical, _many_ companies in
| Silicon Valley are worker-owned (equity compensation)
| tsimionescu wrote:
| They are not worker owned, they have some small amount of
| worker ownership. But the majority of stock is never
| owned by workers, other than the CEO.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| Consider also that VC funds often have pension funds as
| their limited partners. Workers have a claim to their
| pension, and thus a claim to the startup returns that the
| VC invests in.
|
| So yeah it basically comes down to your definition of
| "worker-owned". What fraction of worker ownership is
| necessary? Do C-level execs count as workers? Can it be
| "worker-owned" if the "workers" are people working
| elsewhere?
|
| Beyond the "worker-owned" terminology, why is this
| distinction supposed to matter exactly? Supposing there
| was an SV startup that was relatively generous with
| equity compensation, so over 50% of equity is owned by
| non-C-level employees. What would you expect to change,
| if anything, if that threshold was passed?
| tsimionescu wrote:
| > Supposing there was an SV startup that was relatively
| generous with equity compensation, so over 50% of equity
| is owned by non-C-level employees. What would you expect
| to change, if anything, if that threshold was passed?
|
| If the workers are majority owners, then they can, for
| example, fire a CEO that is leading the company in the
| wrong direction, or trying to cut their salaries, or
| anything like that.
| kortilla wrote:
| Worker owned coops are not socialist unless the
| government forces it.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Worker-owned co-ops is the basic idea of socialism (that
| is what "workers owning the means of productions" means
| in modern language).
| pembrook wrote:
| Have you been human before? competition for resources and
| status is an instinctive trait.
|
| It rears its head regardless of what sociopolitical
| environment you place us in.
|
| You're either competing to offer better products or
| services to customers...or you're competing for your
| position in the breadline or politburo via black markets.
| AJ007 wrote:
| Unfortunately it's called war and it appears to be part
| of human nature.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Even in the Soviet Union there were multiple design
| bureaus competing for designs of things like aircraft.
| Tupolec, Ilyushin, Sukhoi, Mikoyan-Gyurevich (MiG),
| Yakolev, Mil. There were quite a lot. Several (not all,
| they had their specialisations) provided designs when a
| requirement was raised. Not too different from the US yet
| not capitalist.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| Your excellent comments make me grateful that I am
| retired and just work part time on my own research and
| learning. I believe you when you say professional
| developers will need large inference compute budgets.
|
| Probably because I am an old man, but I don't personally
| vibe with full time AI assistant use, rather I will use
| the best models available for brief periods on specific
| problems.
|
| Ironically, when I do use the best models available to me
| it is almost always to work on making weaker and smaller
| models running on Ollama more effective for my interests.
|
| BTW, I have used neural network tech in production since
| 1985, and I am thrilled by the rate of progress, but
| worry about such externalities as energy use,
| environmental factors, and hurting the job market for
| many young people.
| AJ007 wrote:
| I've been around for a while (not quite retirement age)
| and this time is the closest to the new feeling I had
| using the internet and web in the early days. There are
| simultaneously infinite possibilities but also great
| uncertainty what pathways will be taken and how things
| will end up.
|
| There are a lot of parts in the near term to dislike
| here, especially the consequences for privacy, adtech,
| energy use. I do have concerns that the greatest pitfalls
| in the short terms are being ignored while other
| uncertainties are being exaggerated. (I've been warning
| on deep learning model use for recommendation engines for
| years, and only a sliver of people seem to have picked up
| on that one, for example.)
|
| On the other hand, if good enough models can run locally,
| humans can end up with a lot more autonomy and choice
| with their software and operating systems than they have
| today. The most powerful models might run on
| supercomputers and just be solving the really big science
| problems. There is a lot of fantastic software out there
| that does not improve by throwing infinite resources at
| it.
|
| Another consideration is while the big tech firms are
| spending (what will likely approach) hundreds of billions
| of dollars in a race to "AGI", what matters to those same
| companies even more than winning is making sure that the
| winner isn't a winner takes all. In that case, hopefully
| the outcome looks more like open source.
| bilsbie wrote:
| Is there a cheap version for hobbyists? Or what's the
| best thing for hobbyists to use, just cut and paste?
| hanklazard wrote:
| Cursor at 20$/M is pretty great
| taxborn wrote:
| I've been enjoying Zed lately
| notpushkin wrote:
| Zed is fantastic. Just dipping my toes in agentic AI, but
| I was able to fix a failing test I spent maybe 15 minutes
| trying to untangle in a couple minutes with Zed. (It did
| proceed to break other tests in that file though, but I
| quickly reverted that.)
|
| It is also BYOA or you can buy a subscription from Zed
| themselves and help them out. I currently use it with my
| free Copilot+ subscription (GitHub hands it out to pretty
| much any free/open source dev).
| mrmincent wrote:
| Claude Code pro is ~$20USD/ month and is nearly enough
| for someone like me who can't use it at work and is just
| playing around with it after work. I'm loving it.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Claude Code with a Claude subscription _is_ the cheap
| version for current SOTA.
|
| "Agentic" workflows burn through tokens like there's no
| tomorrow, and the new Opus model is so expensive per-
| token that the Max plan pays itself back in one or two
| _days_ of moderate usage. When people reports their
| Claude Code sessions costing $100+ per _day_ , I read
| that as the API price _equivalent_ - it makes no sense to
| _actually_ "pay as you go" with Claude right now.
|
| This is arguably the cheapest option available on the
| market right now in terms of results per dollar, but only
| if you can afford the subscription itself. There's also
| time/value component here: on Max x5, it's quite easy to
| hit the usage limits of Opus (fortunately the limit is
| per 5 hours or so); Max x20 is only twice the price of
| Max x5 but gives you 4x more Opus; better model = less
| time spent fighting with and cleaning up after the AI.
| It's expensive to be poor, unfortunately.
| leptons wrote:
| >less time spent fighting with and cleaning up after the
| AI.
|
| I've yet to use anything but copilot in vscode, which is
| 1/2 the time helpful, and 1/2 wasting my time. For me
| it's almost break-even, if I don't count the frustration
| it causes.
|
| I've been reading all these AI-related comment sections
| and none of it is convincing me there is really anything
| better out there. AI seems like break-even at best, but
| usually it's just "fighting with and cleaning up after
| the AI", and I'm really not interested in doing any of
| that. I was a lot happier when I wasn't constantly being
| shown bad code that I need to read and decide about, when
| I'm perfectly capable of writing the code myself without
| the hasle of AI getting in my way.
|
| AI burnout is probably already a thing, and I'm close to
| that point already. I do not have hope that it will get
| much better than it is, as the core of the tech is
| essentially just a guessing game.
| dgacmu wrote:
| I tend to agree except for one recent experience: I built
| a quick prototype of an application whose backend I had
| written twice before and finally wanted to do right. But
| the existing infrastructure for it had bit-rotted, and I
| am definitely not a UI person. Every time I dive into
| html+js I have to spend hours updating my years-out-of-
| date knowledge of how to do things.
|
| So I vibe coded it. I was extremely specific about how
| the back end should operate and pretty vague about the
| UI, and basically everything worked.
|
| But there were a few things about this one: first, it was
| just a prototype. I wanted to kick around some ideas
| quickly, and I didn't care at all about code quality.
| Second, I already knew exactly how to do the hard parts
| in the back end, so part of the prompt input was the
| architecture and mechanism that I wanted.
|
| But it spat out that html app way way faster than I could
| have.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| If you are a hobbyist, just use Google's gemini-cli
| (currently free!) on a half dozen projects to get
| experience.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| cursor on a $20/month plan (if you burn thru the free
| credits) or gemini-cli (free) are 2 great ways to try out
| this kinda stuff for a hobbyist. you can throw in v0 too,
| $5/month free credits. susana's free tier can give you a
| db as well.
| mnky9800n wrote:
| Shhh don't say that. I love Max. I don't want it to go
| anywhere.
| sothatsit wrote:
| You can tell Claude Code to use opus using /model and
| then it doesn't fall back to Sonnet btw. I am on the $100
| plan and I hit rate-limits every now and then, but not
| enough to warrant using Sonnet instead of Opus.
| rolisz wrote:
| Before they announced the Max plans, I could easily hit
| 10-15$ of API usage per day (without even being a heavy
| user).
|
| Since they announced that you can use the Pro subscription
| with Claude Code, I've been using it much more and I've
| never ever been rate limited.
| 3uler wrote:
| This is what I don't get about the cost being reported by
| Claude code. At work I use it against our AWS Bedrock
| instance, and most sessions will say 15/20 dollars and
| I'll have multiple agents running. So I can easily spend
| 60 bucks a day in reported cost. Our AWS Bedrock bill is
| only a small fraction of that? Why would you over charge
| on direct usage of your API?
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Anthropic has costs beyond their AWS bill ....
| asaddhamani wrote:
| API prices are way higher than actual inference cost.
| csomar wrote:
| The way I am doing the math with my Max subscription and
| assuming DeepSeek API prices, it is still x5 times cheaper.
| So either DeepSeek is losing money (unlikely) or Anthropic
| is losing lots of money (more likely). Grok kinda confirms
| my suspicions. Assuming DeepSeek prices, I've probably
| spent north of $100 of Grok compute. I didn't pay Grok or
| Twitter a single cent. $100 is a _lot_ of loss for a single
| user.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| what?? sonnet/opus is way better than deepseek, how can
| you compare that to deepseek
|
| also you probably talking about distilled deepseek model
| nurettin wrote:
| I haven't tried deepseek but I've seen claude do crazy
| things if you are at the correct random.seed
| Tokumei-no-hito wrote:
| what do you mean about correct random.seed?
| christina97 wrote:
| It means "if you're unlucky".
| nurettin wrote:
| To me, claude usually feels like a bumbling idiot. But in
| extremely rare cases it feels like a sentient super
| intelligence. I facetiously assumed that in those cases
| it ran on the correct RNG seed.
| manojlds wrote:
| Comparison should be with Claude API pricing. It doesn't
| matter what other models cost.
| vmg12 wrote:
| Claude API pricing has significant margin baked in. I
| think it's safe to assume that anthropic is getting 80%
| margin on their api and they are selling claude code for
| less than that.
| artursapek wrote:
| You can spend $200 worth of tokens in a single day using
| the Max $200/mo fixed cost plan.
| Aeolun wrote:
| It probably doesn't cost them all that much? Maybe they were
| offering the API at a 500% markup, and code is just breaking
| even.
| threatripper wrote:
| But Cursor is also offering OpenAI and Google models.
| adidoit wrote:
| Not sure this is true. Inference margins are substantial and
| if you look at your claude code usage it's very clever at
| caching Input | Output | Cache Create |
| Cache Read 916,134 | 11,106,507 | 199,684,538 |
| 2,767,614,506
|
| as an example here's my usage. Massive daily usage for the
| past two months.
| manojlds wrote:
| If open models become big, open coding agents would be bigger
| at that point. Even more motivation as well.
| lvl155 wrote:
| Which is interesting because Sonnet is cheap and Opus is not
| on par with o3 for tasks where you want to deploy it.
| 7thpower wrote:
| Where is a citation on Anthropic increasing cost to cursor? I
| had not seen that news, but it would make sense.
| bernawil wrote:
| you mean the plans are subsidized? pay-per-use doesn't look
| subsidized to me, I can spend 5$ a day on a medium sized
| codebase easily.
| nikcub wrote:
| Cursor see it coming - it's why they're moving to the web and
| mobile[0]
|
| The bigger issue is the advantage Anthropic, Google and OpenAI
| have in developing and deploying their own models. It wasn't
| that long ago that Cursor was reading 50 lines of code at a
| time to save on token costs. Anthropic just came out and yolo'd
| the context window because they could afford to, and it blew
| everything else away.
|
| Cursor could release a cli tomorrow but it wouldn't help them
| compete when Anthropic and Google can always be multiples
| cheaper
|
| [0] https://cursor.com/blog/agent-web
| extr wrote:
| I think this is an interesting and cool direction for Cursor
| to be going in and I don't doubt something like this is the
| future. But I have my doubts whether it will save them in the
| short/medium term:
|
| - AI is not good enough yet to abandon the traditional IDE
| experierence if you're doing anything non-trivial. Hard
| finding use cases for this right now.
|
| - There's no moat here. There are already a dozen "Claude
| Code UI" OSS projects with similar basic functionality.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| I have a whole backlog of trivial tasks I never get around
| to because I'm working on less trivial things.
| Aeolun wrote:
| > Anthropic just came out and yolo'd the context window
| because they could afford to
|
| I don't think this is true at all. The reason CC is so good
| is that they're very deliberate about what goes in the
| context. CC often spends ages reading 5 LOC snippets, but
| afterwards it only has relevant stuff in context.
| nsonha wrote:
| Heard a lot of this context bs parroted all over HN, don't
| buy it. If simply increasing context size can solve
| problem, Gemini would be the best model for everything.
| SamDc73 wrote:
| Gemini tends to be better at bug hunting, but yes
| everything else Claude is still superior
| ec109685 wrote:
| Background of how it works:
| https://kirshatrov.com/posts/claude-code-internals
|
| Prompt: https://gist.github.com/transitive-
| bullshit/487c9cb52c75a970...
| RainyDayTmrw wrote:
| I'm always surprised how short system prompts are. It
| makes me wonder where the rest of the app's behavior is
| encoded.
| manmal wrote:
| Also check out claude-trace, which injects fetch hooks to
| get at the data:
| https://github.com/badlogic/lemmy/tree/main/apps/claude-
| trac...
| anon7000 wrote:
| I've definitely observed that CC is waaaay slower than
| cursor
| ripberge wrote:
| Forking an IDE is not expensive if it's the core product of a
| company with a $900M ARR.
|
| I doubt MS has ever made $900M off of VS Code.
| extr wrote:
| "The same editor you already use for free, but with slightly
| nicer UI for some AI stuff" is not a $900M ARR product.
| conradkay wrote:
| $900m in revenue is easy if you're selling a dollar for
| <$1. Feels like that's what cursor's $20/m "unlimited" plan
| is
| esafak wrote:
| "Some AI stuff" can well be worth that.
| shados wrote:
| CC would explode even further if they had official
| Team/Enterprise plan (likely in the work, Claude Code Waffle
| flag), and worked on Windows without WSL (supposedly pretty
| easy to fix, they just didn't bother). Cursor learnt the % of
| Windows user was really high when they started looking, even
| before they really supported it.
|
| They're likely artificially holding it back either because its
| a loss leader they want to use a very specific way, or because
| they're planning the next big boom/launch (maybe with a new
| model to build hype?).
| absurddoctor wrote:
| They quietly released an update to CC earlier today so it can
| now be run natively on Windows.
| dboreham wrote:
| Conversely Cursor is still broken on WSL2.
| bredren wrote:
| > with a simple extension for some UX improvements
|
| What are the UX improvements?
|
| I was using the Pycharm plugin and didn't notice any actual
| integration.
|
| I had problems with pycharm's terminal--not least of which was
| default 5k line scroll back which while easy to change was
| worst part of CC for me at first.
|
| I finally jumped to using iterm and then using pycharm
| separately to do code review, visual git workflows, some run
| config etc.
|
| But the actual value of Pycharm---and I've been a real booster
| of that IDE has shrank due to CC and moving out of the built in
| terminal is a threat to usage of the product for me.
|
| If the plugin offered some big value I might stick with it but
| I'm not sure what they could even do.
| extr wrote:
| #1 improvement for VS Code users is giving the agent MCP
| tools to get diagnostics from the editor LSPs. Saves a
| tremendous amount of time having the agent run and rerun
| linting commands.
| mh- wrote:
| This is a great point. Now I'm wondering if there's a way
| to get LSPs going with the terminal/TUI interface.
| nsonha wrote:
| opencode has that
| asdev wrote:
| for those who seldom use the terminal, is Claude Code still
| usable? I heard it doesn't do tab autocomplete in IDE like
| Cursor
| virgildotcodes wrote:
| Claude Code is totally different paradigm. You don't edit
| your files directly so there is no tab autocomplete. It's a
| chat session.
|
| There are IDE integrations where you can run it in a terminal
| session while perusing the files through your IDE, but it's
| not powering any autocomplete there AFAIK.
| asdev wrote:
| are people viewing file diffs in the terminal? surely
| people aren't just vibing code changes in
| asib wrote:
| Yes or running claude code in the cursor/vscode terminal
| and watching the files change and then reviewing in IDE.
| I often like to be able to see an entire file when
| reviewing a diff, rather than just the lines that
| changed. Plus it's nice to have go-to-definition when
| reviewing.
| didibus wrote:
| Yes, it shows you the file diff. But generally, the
| workflow is that you git commit a checkpoint, then let it
| make all the changes it wants freely, then in your IDE,
| review what has changed since previous commit, iterate
| the prompts/make your own adjustments to the code, and
| when you like it, git commit.
| golergka wrote:
| that's what lazygit in another terminal tab is for
| martinald wrote:
| Depending on what I'm doing with it I have 3 modes:
|
| Trivial/easy stuff - let it make a PR at the end and
| review in GitHub. It rarely gets this stuff wrong IME or
| does anything stupid.
|
| Moderately complex stuff - let it code away, review/test
| it in my IDE and make any changes myself and tell claude
| what I've changed (and get it to do a quick review of my
| code)
|
| Complex stuff - watch it like a hawk as it is thinking
| and interrupt it constantly asking questions/telling it
| what to do, then review in my IDE.
| evan_ wrote:
| If there's a conflict you just back out your change and
| do it again.
| tptacek wrote:
| I review and modify changes in Zed or Emacs.
| cedws wrote:
| Apparently they are, which is crazy to me. Zed agent mode
| shows modified hunks and you can accept/reject them
| individually. I can't imagine doing it all through the
| CLI, it seems extremely primitive.
| james_marks wrote:
| Yes. I manually read the diff of every proposed change
| and manually accept or deny.
|
| I love CC, but letting it auto-write changes is, at best,
| a waste of time trying to find the bugs after they start
| compounding.
| upcoming-sesame wrote:
| it seems like CC is king at the moment from what I read.
|
| I currently have a Copilot subscription that has 4.1 for
| free but Sonnet 4 and Gemini Pro 2.5 with monthly limits.
| Thinking to switch to CC
|
| I am curious to know which Claude Code subscription most
| people are using... ?
| fooster wrote:
| I just accept all and review in my editor.
| sumedh wrote:
| I use windsurf to check the diff from Claude Code.
| neoecos wrote:
| I think lots of issues with the integration of CC or other
| TUI with graphical IDEs will be solved with stuff like the
| Agentic Coding Protocol that the guys at Zed at working on
| https://www.npmjs.com/package/@zed-industries/agentic-
| coding...
| bn-l wrote:
| I trust zed to get it right over cursor with their
| continual enshittification.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| > _What does Cursor /Windsurf offer over VS Code + CC?_
|
| Cursor's @Docs is still unparalleled and no MCP server for
| documentation fetching even comes close. That is the only
| reason why I still use Cursor, sometimes I have esoteric
| packages that must be used in my code and other IDEs will
| simply hallucinate due to not having such a robust docs
| feature, if any, which is useless to me, and I believe Claude
| Code also falls into that bucket.
| robryan wrote:
| Claude code can get pretty far simply calling `go doc` on
| packages.
| bn-l wrote:
| > Cursor's @Docs is still unparalleled and no MCP server for
| documentation
|
| I strongly disagree. It will put the wrong doc snippets into
| context 99% of the time. If the docs are slightly long then
| forget it, it'll be even worse.
|
| I never use it because of this.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| What packages do you use it for? I honestly never had that
| issue, it's very good in my use cases to find some specific
| function to call or to figure out some specific syntax.
| N3cr0ph4g1st wrote:
| Context7 mcp
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Tried it, doesn't work that great
| zackify wrote:
| Almost all of this was true before they even announced the
| purchase. I was so shocked and now I'm not surprised it fell
| through
| bionhoward wrote:
| does claude code have a privacy mode with zero data retention?
| james_marks wrote:
| Haven't looked recently but when it came out, the story was
| that it was private by default. It uses a regular API token,
| which promises no retention.
| davidclark wrote:
| Is this $900M ARR a reliable number?
|
| Their base is $20/mth. That would equal 3.75M people paying a
| sub to Cursor.
|
| If literally everyone is on their $200/mth plan, then that
| would be 375K paid users.
|
| There's 50M VS Code + VS users (May 2025). [1] 7% of all VS
| Code users having switched to Cursor does not match my personal
| circle of developers. 0.7% . . . Maybe? But, that would be if
| everyone using Cursor were paying $200/month.
|
| Seems impossibly high, especially given the number of _other_
| AI subscription options as well.
|
| [1]
| https://devblogs.microsoft.com/blog/celebrating-50-million-d...
| ashraymalhotra wrote:
| Maybe the OP got confused with Cursor's $900mil raise?
| https://cursor.com/blog/series-c
|
| Last disclosed revenue from Cursor was $500mil. https://www.b
| loomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-05/anysphere...
| extr wrote:
| Yeah that's probably it!
| teiferer wrote:
| That's the same order of magnitude though.
| npinsker wrote:
| It's probably due to the top comment citing that number
| smcleod wrote:
| The $20/month cursor sub is heavily limited though, for basic
| casual usage that's fine but you VERY soon run into its
| limits when working at any speed.
| helloericsf wrote:
| The base plan limit is not hard to hit. Then you're on the
| usage based rocket.
| sumedh wrote:
| Enterprise pay more.
| lunarcave wrote:
| Strictly speaking about large, complex, sprawling codebases, I
| don't think you can beat the experience that an IDE + coding
| agent brings with a terminal-based coding agent.
|
| Auto-regressive nature of these things mean that errors
| accumulate, and IDEs are well placed to give that observability
| to the human, than a coding agent. I can course correct more
| easily in an IDE with clear diffs, coding navigation, than
| following a terminal timeline.
| teruakohatu wrote:
| > I don't think you can beat the experience that an IDE +
| coding agent brings with a terminal-based coding agent.
|
| CC has some integration with VSC it is not all or nothing.
| jdkoeck wrote:
| Honestly, I think the Claude Code integration in VS Code is
| very close to the << nothing >> part of the spectrum!
| nojs wrote:
| You can view and navigate the diffs made by the terminal
| agent in your IDE in realtime, just like Cursor, as well as
| commit, revert, etc. That's really all the "integration" you
| need.
| petesergeant wrote:
| > I don't think you can beat the experience that an IDE +
| coding agent brings with a terminal-based coding agent.
|
| I resisted moving from Roo in VS Code to CC for this reason,
| and then tried it for a day, and didn't go back.
| xnx wrote:
| Is the case for using Claude Code much weaker now that Gemini
| CLI is out?
| apwell23 wrote:
| no. CC is not just a cli. Its cli + their pro/max plan.
|
| gemini cli is very expensive.
| SamDc73 wrote:
| They do have a subscription: it's $22/month, but the whole
| pricing and instructions is very confusing, it took me 15
| min to figure it all out.
| xnx wrote:
| Isn't Gemini CLI 1000 requests/day free?
|
| https://blog.google/technology/developers/introducing-
| gemini...
| sunaookami wrote:
| It's false advertising - 1000 model requests, not 1000
| Gemini 2.5 Pro requests. It drops to Flash after 3-5
| requests and Flash is useless.
| upcoming-sesame wrote:
| Theoretically, practically it is riddled with rate
| limiting issues
|
| https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/issues/1502
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| Wait a minute, have you often run out of the gemini cli
| free daily quota? Their free quota is very generous because
| they are trying to get market/mind share.
| apwell23 wrote:
| it switches to flash almost immediately like in 10-15
| mins . flash sucks.
|
| And even switching is not smooth either. for me when the
| switch happens it just get stuck sitting there so i have
| to restart cli.
| apwell23 wrote:
| thats not a fair comparision CC is
|
| agentic tool + anthropic subsidized pricing.
|
| Second part is why it has "exploded"
| baby wrote:
| I've tried all the CLI and vscode with agent mode (and
| personally I prefer o4-mini) is the best thing out there.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| just curious because I'm inexperienced with all the latest
| tools here
|
| > - Tab completion model (Cursor's remaining moat)
|
| What is that? I have Gemini Code Assist installed in VSCode and
| I'm getting tab completion. (yes, LLM based tab completion)
|
| Which, as an aside I find useful when it works but also often
| extremely confusing to read. Like say in C++ I type
| int myVar = 123
|
| The editor might show int myVar = 123;
|
| And it's nearly impossible to tell that I didn't enter that `;`
| so I move on to the next line instead of pressing tab only to
| find the `;` wasn't really there. That's also probably an easy
| example. Literally it feels like 1 of 6 lines I type I can't
| tell what is actually in the file and what is being suggested.
| Any tips? Maybe I just need to set some special background
| color for text being suggested.
|
| and PS: that tiny example is not an example of a great tab
| completion. A better one is when I start editing 1 of 10
| similar lines, I edit the first one, it sees the pattern and
| auto does the other 9. Can also do the "type a comment and it
| fills in the code" thing. Just trying to be clear I'm getting
| LLM tab completion and not using Cursor
| james_marks wrote:
| This feeling of, "what exactly is in the file?" is why I have
| all AI turned off in my IDE, and run CC independently.
|
| I get all AI or none, so it's always obvious what's
| happening.
|
| Completions are OK, but I did not enjoy the feeling of both
| us having a hand on the wheel and trying to type at the same
| time.
| acka wrote:
| It gets even worse when all three of IntelliSense, AI
| completion, and the human are all vying for control of the
| input. This can be very frustrating at times.
| ec109685 wrote:
| Tab completion in cursor lets you keep hitting tab and it
| will jump to next logical spot in file to keep editing or
| completing from.
| anonymid wrote:
| I never got the valuation. I (and many others) have built open
| source agent plugins that are pretty much just as good, in our
| free time (check out magenta nvim btw, I think it turned out
| neat!)
| HenriNext wrote:
| - Forking VSCode is very easy; you can do it in 1 hour.
|
| - Anthropic doesn't use the inputs for training.
|
| - Cursor doesn't have $900M ARR. That was the raise. Their ARR
| is ~$500m [1].
|
| - Claude Code already support the niceties, including "add
| selection to chat", accessing IDE's realtime warnings and
| errors (built-in tool 'ideDiagnostics'), and using IDE's native
| diff viewer for reviewing the edits.
|
| [1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/05/cursors-anysphere-
| nabs-9-9...
| edoceo wrote:
| The cost of the fork isn't creating it, it's maintaining it.
| But maybe AI could help :/
| whatevaa wrote:
| The cost of vscode fork is that microsoft has restricted
| extension marketplace for forks. You have to maintain
| separate one, that is the real dealbreaker
| blackoil wrote:
| Eclipse maintains a public repo.
| notpushkin wrote:
| https://open-vsx.org/
| jahewson wrote:
| Forking Linux is very easy; you can do it in 1 hour.
| threecheese wrote:
| Claude Code is just proving that coding agents can be
| successful. The interface isn't magic, it just fits the model
| and integrates with a system in all the right ways. The
| Anthropic team for that product is very small comparatively
| (their most prolific contributor is Claude), and I think it's
| more of a technology proof than a core competency - it's a
| great API $ business lever, but there's no reason for them to
| try and win the "agentic coding UI" market. Unless Generative
| AI flops everywhere else, these markets will continue to emerge
| and need focus. The Windsurf kerfuffle is further proof that
| OpenAI doesn't see the market as must-win for a frontier model
| shop.
|
| And so I'd say this isn't a harbinger of the death of Cursor,
| instead proof that there's a future in the market they were
| just recently winning.
| extr wrote:
| I was being hyperbolic saying their ARR will go to zero.
| That's obviously not the case, but the point is that CC has
| revealed their real product was not "agentic coding UI", it
| was "insanely cheap tokens". I have no doubt they will
| continue to see success, but their future right now looks
| closer to being a competitor to free/open tools like
| cline/roo code, as well as the CLI entrants, not a standalone
| $500M ARR juggarnaut. They have no horse in the race in the
| token market, they're a middleman.
|
| They either need to create their own model and compete on
| cost, or hope that token costs come down dramatically so as
| to be too cheap to meter.
| hv23 wrote:
| Digging in here more... why would you say it isn't in
| Anthropic's interest to win the "agentic coding UI" market?
|
| My mental model is that these foundation model companies will
| _need_ to invest in and win in a significant number of the
| app layer markets in order to realize enough revenue to drive
| returns. And if coding / agentic coding is one of the top X
| use cases for tokens at the app layer, seems logical that
| they'd want to be a winner in this market.
|
| Is your view that these companies will be content to win at
| the model layer and be agnostic as to the app layer?
| threecheese wrote:
| My intuition is that their fundamental business is
| executing on the models, and any other products are
| secondary and exist to drive revenue that they can use to
| compete against Google/OpenAI/Meta as well as to ensure -
| and demonstrate - that their models are performant in these
| new markets. Claude needs to be great at coding, but
| Anthropic doesn't need to own Coding. Claude Code is
| growing their core business, just like a Claude Robotics or
| a Claude Scheduling might, but they cant focus on robotics
| or scheduling because that takes them away from the core
| business of models. A strategic relationship with Cursor
| might have been enough to accomplish this, but it wasn't -
| maybe Cursor couldn't execute fast enough, or didn't align
| on priorities, or whatever. I've watched a bunch of
| interviews with the CC team and I very much get the
| impression that it was more "holy shit, this works great"
| than a product strategy.
|
| You may be right about "they need to invest in and win" in
| order to have __enough__ revenue to outcompete the nation-
| state sized competition, but this stuff is moving way to
| fast for anyone know.
| re-thc wrote:
| > A strategic relationship with Cursor might have been
| enough to accomplish this, but it wasn't
|
| It's a huge risk as Cursor can get acquired, just like
| what this news article is about.
| ryanobjc wrote:
| Just cancelled my Cursor sub due to claude code, so heavily
| agree.
| kmarc wrote:
| The forked IDE thing I don't understand either, but...
|
| During the evaluation at a previous job, we found that windsurf
| is waaaay better than anything else. They were expensive (to
| train on our source code directly) but the solution the offered
| was outperforming others.
| RestlessAPI wrote:
| I use Windsurf so I remain in the driver's seat. Using AI
| coding tools too much feels like brain rot where I can't think
| sharply anymore. Having auto complete guess my next edit as I'm
| typing is great because I still retain all the control over the
| code base. There's never any blocks of code that I can't be
| bothered to look at, because I wrote everything still.
| firesteelrain wrote:
| Windsurf big claim to fame was that you could run their model
| in airgap and they said they did not train on GPL code. This
| was an option available for Enterprise customers until they
| took it away recently to prevent self hosting
| ec109685 wrote:
| Good analysis. And Claude code itself will be mercilessly
| copied, so even if another model jumps ahead, small switching
| cost.
|
| That said, the creator of Claude Code jumped to Cursor so they
| must see a there there.
| bilsbie wrote:
| Is Claude code expensive? Can you control the costs or can it
| surprise you.
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| On a subscription, it is 100% predictable: $20, $100, or
| $200/month
| chatmasta wrote:
| The Microsoft investments in both VSCode and GitHub are looking
| incredibly prescient.
| oblio wrote:
| Turns out, Balmer was right.
| Abishek_Muthian wrote:
| > - Tab completion model (Cursor's remaining moat)
|
| My local ollama + continue + Qwen 2.5 coder gives good tab
| completion with minimal latency; how much better is Cursor's
| tab completion model?
|
| I'm still weary of letting LLM edit my code so my local setup
| gives me sufficient assistance with tab completion and
| occasional chat.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I often use the same setup. Qwen 2.5 coder is very good on
| its own, but my Emacs setup doesn't also use web search when
| that would be appropriate. I have separately been
| experimenting with the Perplexity Sonar APIs that combine
| models and search, but I don't have that integrated with my
| Emacs and Qwen setup - and that automatic integration would
| be very difficult to do well! If I could 'automatically' use
| a local Qwen, or other model, and fall back to using a paid
| service like Perplexity or Gemini grounding APIs just when
| needed that would be fine indeed.
|
| I am thinking about a new setup as I write this: in Emacs, I
| explicitly choose a local Ollama model or a paid API like
| Gemini or OpenAI, so I should just make calling Perplexity
| Sonar APIs another manual choice. (Currently I only use
| Perplexity from Python scripts.)
|
| If I owned a company, I would frequently evaluate privacy and
| security aspects of using commercial APIs. Using Ollama
| solves that.
| oblio wrote:
| What kind of hardware are you using?
| osigurdson wrote:
| >> Claude Code has absolutely exploded
|
| Does anyone have a comparison between this and OpenAI Codex? I
| find OpenAI's thing really good actually (vastly better
| workflow that Windsurf). Maybe I am missing out however.
| sunaookami wrote:
| Codex CLI is very bad, it often struggles to even find the
| file and goes on a rampage inside the home directory trying
| to find the file and commenting on random folders. Using
| o3/o4-mini in Aider is decent though.
| osigurdson wrote:
| It isn't a cli thing, it is available in the ChatGPT ui.
| I've been using it for a few weeks.
| coolKid721 wrote:
| never met anyone who used codex lol
| osigurdson wrote:
| Maybe that is why they added it to ChatGPT in the regular
| $20 / month plan. It seems pretty good but again maybe CC
| is way better.
| brundolf wrote:
| I also just prefer CC's UX. I've tried to make myself use
| Copilot and Roo and I just couldn't. The extra mental overhead
| and UI context-switching took me out of the flow. And tab
| completion has never felt valuable to me.
|
| But the chat UX is so simple it doesn't take up any extra
| brain-cycles. It's easier to alt-tab to and from; it feels like
| slacking a coworker. I can have one or more terminal windows
| open with agents I'm managing, and still monitor/intervene in
| my editor as they work. Fits much nicer with my brain, and
| accelerates my flow instead of disrupting it
|
| There's something starkly different for me about not having to
| think about exactly what context to feed to the tool, which
| text to highlight or tabs to open, which predefined agent to
| select, which IDE button to press
|
| Just formulate my concepts and intent and then express those in
| words. If I need to be more precise in my words then I will be,
| but I stay in a concepts + words headspace. That's very
| important for conserving my own mental context window
| anonzzzies wrote:
| I think CC is just far more useful; I use it for literally
| everything and without MCP (except puppeteer sometimes) as it
| just writes python/bash scripts to do that far better than all
| those hacked together MCP garbage bins. It controls my computer
| & writes code. It made me better as well as now I actually
| write code, including GUI/web apps, that's are always fully
| scriptable. It helps me, but it definitely helps CC; it can
| just interrogate/test everything I make without puppeteer (or
| other web browser control, which is always brittle as hell).
| moltar wrote:
| And open source tools like aider are, of course, even more
| validated and get more eyes.
|
| Plus recently launched OpenCode, open source CC is gaining
| traction fast.
|
| There was always very little moat in the model wrapper.
|
| The main value of CC is the free tool built by people who
| understand all the internals of their own models.
| selvan wrote:
| Cursor - co-pilot/AI pair programming usecases.
|
| Claude Code - Agentic/Autonomous coding usecases.
|
| Both have their own place in programming, though there are
| overlaps.
| khurs wrote:
| >What does Cursor/Windsurf offer over VS Code + CC?
|
| A lot of devs are not superstar devs.
|
| They don't want a terminal tool, or anything they have to
| configure.
|
| A IDE you can just download and 'it just works' has value. And
| there are companies that will pay.
| dukeyukey wrote:
| CC _is_ that took. npm install, login, give tasks. Diff
| automatically appears in your IDE (in VSC/Intellij at least).
| loandbehold wrote:
| You don't need to be a superstar dev to use CC. If you can
| use chat window you can use CC.
| old_man_cato wrote:
| A lot of engineers underestimate the learning curve required
| to jump from IDE to terminal. Multiple generations of
| engineers were raised on IDEs. It's really hard to break that
| mental model.
| firecall wrote:
| Unless I'm understanding it wrong, the Tab Completion in Cursor
| isn't a moat anymore.
|
| VSCode & CoPilot now offer it.
|
| Is it as good? Maybe not.
|
| But they are really working hard over there at Copilot and seem
| to be catching up.
|
| I get an Edu license for Copilot, so just ditched Cursor!
| andrewingram wrote:
| I agree it has a good chance of catching up, but the
| difference in quality is pretty noticeable today. I'd much
| rather stick with vscode, because I hate all the subtle ways
| Cursor changes the UI; like taking over the keyboard shortcut
| for clearing the scrollback in the terminal. But I find it's
| pretty hard to use Copilot's tab completion after using
| Cursor for a while.
| redhale wrote:
| Cursor's multi-file tab completion and multi-file diff
| experience are worth $20 easily IMO.
|
| I truly do not understand people's affinity for a CLI interface
| for coding agents. Scriptability I understand, but surely we
| could agree that CC with Cursor's UX would be superior to CC's
| terminal alone, right? That's why CC is pushing IDE integration
| -- they're just not there yet.
| ghc wrote:
| > surely we could agree that CC with Cursor's UX
|
| I can't stand the UX, or VS Code's UX in general. I vastly
| prefer having CC open in a terminal alongside neovim. CC is
| fully capable of opening diffs in neovim or otherwise
| completely controlling neovim by talking to its socket.
| iwontberude wrote:
| I don't see how there will be any money to be made in this
| industry once these models are quantized and all local. It's
| going to be one of the most painful bubble deflations we have
| ever seen and the biggest success of open source in our
| lifetimes.
| manojlds wrote:
| Since then OpenAI has released Codex as well (the web one)
| mountainriver wrote:
| I too am an engineer that thinks CLI's are cool, but if you
| believe it's even remotely as useful as an IDE then give me a
| break.
| benjaminwootton wrote:
| I do agree, Claude Code absolutely changed the game. It is
| outstanding.
| janpaul123 wrote:
| Kilo Code CEO here. This is why open source is so important!!
| acaloiar wrote:
| https://archive.is/Rdt3z
| dalemhurley wrote:
| Cursor (and Garry Tan's X post) has shown us that the VC money is
| propping up these companies astounding growth, the only way for
| them to become profitable is to increase the cost per a request,
| which means they need to innovate like crazy.
|
| The moat is paper thin.
|
| GitHub has open sourced copilot.
|
| The open source community is working hard on their own projects.
|
| No doubt Cursor is moving fast to create amazing innovations, but
| if the competition only focuses on thin wrappers they are not
| worth the billion dollar valuations.
|
| I love watching this space as it is moving extremely fast.
| tootie wrote:
| I think the recent Grok release and considering xAI was
| relatively late to the game shows that the only moat to
| training giant models is how many GPUs you can buy. ChatGPT was
| earth-shattering and it took less than two years for multiple
| credible competitors to match or exceed them. Making these
| models profitable is proving extremely difficult in the face of
| so much competition and such unsustainable expectations being
| set. Google seems to be most likely to sustain themselves
| through this melee. Them and the Chinese companies.
| bmau5 wrote:
| What was Garry's post?
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| I have same question
| ec109685 wrote:
| https://x.com/garrytan/status/1941553682736439307
|
| The thesis is that once you're paying $200 a month, you're
| beholden and won't pay and compare it with anything else.
| romanovcode wrote:
| Until something else comes around for similar price and is
| much better.
|
| Good thing for consumers who use AI coding tools is that
| there is no lock-in like in Photoshop or similar software
| where you hone your skills for years to use particular
| tool. Switching from Cursor to any other platform would
| literally take 10 minutes.
| woeirua wrote:
| There is no moat. If you're a true believer that strong agents
| are around the corner, then all of these add on companies will
| be obsolete in a few years. The first company to strong agents
| can trivially rebuild Cursor or Windsurf.
| herval wrote:
| If you believe AGI is around the corner, doesn't it mean
| it'll replace ALL products?
| yieldcrv wrote:
| So grifting for investor cash and revenue right now is the
| obvious play either way
| kevindamm wrote:
| That would be true if the product was the goal. In my
| experience, marketing > market > product
|
| Even with AGI in hand, there will still be competition
| between offerings based on externalities, inertia, or
| battle-testedness, or authority. Maybe super-intelligence
| would change the calculus of that, but you'd still probably
| find opportunities beyond just letting your pool of agents
| vibe code it.
| herval wrote:
| Sounds like the kind of thing Windsurf & Cursor had as
| their most valuable asset - mindshare and authority?
| pjc50 wrote:
| If you believe AGI is round the corner (I don't), then you
| face the dilemma of investing in a company that will be the
| one profitable survivor in a disintegrating world.
| charcircuit wrote:
| This would only be true if it was cheap to run and would
| return results quickly. If AGI only has compute to serve 1
| customer per hour then their is an upper bound of market
| share it can take from other products.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| If AGI is around the corner, I don't believe one single
| company will "own" that tech. It will be like it is today,
| where you have multiple models competing.
|
| And after that, AGI will be open source.
|
| In the end, ownership of data and compute will be the
| things that define the victors.
| aziaziazi wrote:
| We don't eat _intelligence_ : bikes, bottles, food,
| energy... have room for improvement but I hardly see how
| AGI would replace them.
|
| Same for physical services like labors, miners and cooks,
| even taxi/bus drivers for +99% of the world. Automation
| immensely improve their efficiency and the Modern Times is
| the past for half of the globe, but AGI isn't the main
| facilitator.
|
| Replace all (most*) Silicon Valley -and cousins- similar
| "products" and services, perhaps yes !
| seunosewa wrote:
| Google spent 2.4 billion dollars
| TechDebtDevin wrote:
| Cursor just committed mass consumer fraud at worst, and at best
| pissed off all their best customers. I feel really sorry for
| those who invested at a 9bb valuation.
| jen729w wrote:
| > I feel really sorry for those who invested at a 9bb
| valuation.
|
| Because they didn't do their jobs properly?
| aeve890 wrote:
| >Cursor just committed mass consumer fraud at worst, and at
| best pissed off all their best customers.
|
| What happened?
| wadefletch wrote:
| flip-flopping on pricing has led users to feel nickel-and-
| dimed
|
| i like cursor fine, but check out the forum/subreddit to
| see people talking like addicts, pissed their fix is
| getting more expensive
|
| i think this aggressive reaction is more pronounced for
| non-programmers who are making things for the first time.
| they tasted a new power and they don't want it taken away.
| bn-l wrote:
| No I'm a programmer and I'm better about the rug pull
| also.
| TechDebtDevin wrote:
| I agree with your take, but I still don't excuse anti
| consumer practices like that. It annoys me because this
| is a repeat problem in this space, where these companies
| don't take into account the market dynamics, or costs of
| their service. From the start I've been looking at these
| $20.00 subscriptions, and then my own personal api per
| token costs and been wondering how they aren't all
| bankrupt.
|
| Look no further than founders in the sports betting
| space, like the fanduel founders. Borrow a bunch of money
| at huge valuations because of hype and ignore the fact,
| that despite it being exciting and popular, the margins
| are like <5%. Fanduel founders sold for 400 something
| million, walked away with nothing. Its now a multibillion
| dollar company when the new owners realized the product
| was marketing, not the vig. These AI companies are
| shifting towards their "marketing" eras.
| sbarre wrote:
| I think any "value add" business that has a primary
| product built on top of another larger business' non-
| commodity service(s) runs the risk of having to re-do
| their pricing in ways that are outside their control.
|
| This is nothing new. I'm not sure if it's "anti-consumer"
| as much as it's just a risky play from a brand and
| customer happiness viewpoint. Because your prices can be
| forced up by your supplier, and your customers will be
| mad at you, not at your supplier.
|
| I do also think it is on consumers - in some part - to go
| into it with eyes open and do their research.
|
| Thankfully a product like Cursor is a monthly sub and not
| a big up-front investment so if you don't like - or can't
| afford - the new pricing, you can just stop paying.
| hobofan wrote:
| What surprises me is just how much they've missed the
| mark.
|
| I'm not an extreme user of Cursor. It has become an
| essential part of my workflow, but I also probably on the
| lower/medium section of users. I know that a lot of my
| friends were spending $XXX amounts/month on extra usage
| with them, while I've never gone beyond 50% included
| premium credits usage.
|
| After their changes I'm getting hit with throttling
| multiple times a day, which likely means that the same
| thing happens to almost every Cursor user. So that means
| one or more of:
|
| - They are jacking up the prices, to squeeze out more
| profit, so it looks good in the VC game
|
| - They had to jack up the prices, so that they aren't
| running at a loss anymore (that would be a bad indicator
| regarding profitability for the whole field)
|
| - They are really incompetent about simulating/estimating
| the impact of their pricing decisions, which also isn't a
| good future indicator for their customers
| raesene9 wrote:
| My _guess_ is that it 's your second scenario there
| (avoid running at a loss). In the start-up game
| scale/growth is the most important thing and profits
| really aren't that important. you want to show to later
| stage VCs that your idea has traction and there's a large
| addressable market.
|
| Whilst profits aren't important you also can't burn all
| your current capital, so if the burn rate gets too high
| you have to put up prices, which seems likely to be what
| Cursor is doing.
| LunaSea wrote:
| That's where the real test lies for Cursor and
| programming LLMs.
|
| Will users feel that a $200 subscription is worth it or
| not?
| lelanthran wrote:
| I think what everyone, including those programmers
| advocating coding agents, are forgetting is that if you
| can have a full time programmer for $200/m, then that
| becomes the new value of programming labour in the open
| market.
|
| IOW, the market will slowly but surely drive the labour
| rate for programming down to the cost of the cheapest
| coding agent.
|
| So, sure, boasting about a 10x speedo on boilerplate has
| good metrics, but let's not delude ourselves that
| programmers are going to be paid enough to afford the
| $200/m coding agent in the future.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| I want that entitled attitude to spread. Destroy
| profitability.
| immibis wrote:
| If the people are still paying the increased prices, it's
| a success. Rugpulling literal addicts is a _great_
| business model. Remember that business profits are
| primary, not consumer opinion.
| parthdesai wrote:
| Gary gives off a grifter vibe to me. Such a shame seeing how YC
| has fallen
| sebmellen wrote:
| He blocked me (a relative nobody) on X for remarking on the
| number of people I know who've made it to YC on completely
| fraudulent credentials.
| atakan_gurkan wrote:
| His reaction seems entirely appropriate. He could ignore
| you, but then you might keep replying to his posts and
| potentially spread incorrect but damaging information. He
| is losing close to zero by blocking you, but preventing a
| potential big loss. Why did you make that remark, if not to
| damage YC's reputation? This does not seem like the correct
| approach, if you wanted to improve their selection process.
| samrus wrote:
| > Why did you make that remark, if not to damage YC's
| reputation?
|
| Seems harsh and cultish to assume malice. He didnt say
| you parents have false credentials
|
| I would say calling out people and institutions like that
| is important so as to keep them honest, and if they arent
| honest and are trying to grift/defraud people then they
| deserve the reputation loss
|
| > He is losing close to zero by blocking you, but
| preventing a potential big loss.
|
| Thats great for gary, but the rest of the world isnt
| there waiting to be optimized for his benefit. If people
| trust YC to incubate good talent, but feel its becoming a
| hub for grifters, then some accountability is in order.
| Institutions are beholden to their public stakeholders,
| even private institutions, because they still have people
| who are using and supporting them
| raincole wrote:
| Well, incorrect or not, now that person has a very strong
| motivation to talk bad about YC. Smart "reaction."
| sebmellen wrote:
| The hilarious part is that I never interacted with him
| directly at all. I was just commenting something to a
| mutual on X, the thread blew up, he snooped it, and went
| on a blocking spree. It may have been different if I were
| directly accosting him in replies to his posts.
| BrtByte wrote:
| It feels like we're watching a hype cycle in real time
| anton-c wrote:
| I seriously cannot keep up. I fell a bit behind and now I feel
| I need a primer to know who owns/acquired/developed all these
| additional things surrounding the ai space
| theyinwhy wrote:
| That information is as important as knowing about soap opera
| characters.
| Andrex wrote:
| I really hope Sonny doesn't go through with killing Marco!
| ashvardanian wrote:
| The title made sense until the comma, and then it didn't :)
| rvz wrote:
| This deal always looked strange in the first place. The usage of
| Windsurf was significantly lower than Cursor and Copilot and
| somehow it was worth $3B.
|
| Given the release of Claude Code, it was already over for them.
| pimlottc wrote:
| @dang - The title's wording suggest that OpenAI's CEO is leaving,
| not Windsurf. A more accurate title might be: "Windsurf's deal
| with OpenAI is off, and its CEO is going to Google"
| dang wrote:
| Ok, thanks! (Submitted title was ""OpenAI's Windsurf deal is
| off -- and its CEO is going to Google"")
| tlogan wrote:
| Could anyone explain the implications of this for Windsurf as a
| company? Are they going to close?
| jamesliudotcc wrote:
| Nothing for certain, but yes. The IP payout is to give the
| investors something.
| mrcwinn wrote:
| What if OpenAI is buying Cursor instead?
| jamesliudotcc wrote:
| Not out of the question after a week of Cursor just absolutely
| torching goodwill
| frays wrote:
| Could you elaborate or provide more context for those who
| don't use Cursor?
| bialpio wrote:
| I'm assuming it's this:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44538243
| submeta wrote:
| I went from Emacs to VS Code, then to Cursor, next to Claude
| Code, which is so good that I feel like I am having half a dozen
| junior devs at my fingertips, 24/7.
|
| Since Claude Code is cli based, I reviewed my cli toolset:
| Migrated from iTerm2 to Ghostty and Tmux, from Cursor to NeoVim
| (my God is it good!).
|
| Just had a 14h workday with this tooling. It's so good that I
| complete the work of weeks and months within days! Absolutely
| beast.
|
| At this point I am thinking IDEs do not reflect the changing
| reality of software development. They are designed for navigating
| project folders, writing / changing files. But I don't review
| files that much anymore. I rather write prompts, watch Claude
| Code create a plan, implement it, even write meaningful commit
| messages.
|
| Yes I can navigate the project with neovim, yes I can make
| commits in git and in lazygit, but my task is best spent in
| designing, planning, prompting, reviewing and testing.
| didibus wrote:
| > I don't review files that much anymore
|
| You don't review the code? Just test it works?
| yoz-y wrote:
| At work we're encouraged to use AI, so I do. For me the one
| thing that works well is using it to write one off scripts
| that do stuff and would be a chore to write.
|
| Usually in 2-3 prompts I can get a python or shell script
| that reads some file list somewhere, reads some json/csv
| elsewhere. Combines it in various ways and spits out some
| output to be ingested by some other pipeline.
|
| I just test this code if it works it's good.
|
| Never in my life would I put this in a critical system
| though. When I review these files they are full of tiny
| errors that would blow up in spectacular manner if the input
| was slightly off somewhere.
|
| It's good for what it is. But I'm honestly afraid of
| production code being vibe coded by these tools.
| rileymichael wrote:
| > It's so good that I complete the work of weeks and months
| within days
|
| and yet you're pulling 14 hour workdays..
| nilslice wrote:
| i get it... i find the productivity is extremely addictive
| jen729w wrote:
| Well you can't risk Claude quitting overnight. It forgets
| everything it did the day before and now you have to start
| over ... must ... finish ... tonight ... within ... context
| ... window.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Fortunately LLMs are stateless thus not affected by passage
| of time - your context stays exactly as it was while the
| tool maintaining it is running.
|
| (Prompt caches are another thing; leaving it for the night
| and resuming the next day will cost you a little extra on
| resume, if you're using models via API pay-as-you-go
| billing.)
| lbrito wrote:
| So half a dozen junior devs plus 14h workday. That's a ton of
| surplus value right there. Hope he's getting a cut!
| handfuloflight wrote:
| That doesn't negate that he is compressing his backlog.
| apwell23 wrote:
| yes vibecoding is addicting like that. but if you are not
| reviewing any code and simply vibing then in my expreience
| you'll eventually get stuck in "its still not working" loops
| beause you have no other context or insight to provide it other
| than that. Then you have either accept what you have or throw
| the whole thing out and/or actually read the code . kind of
| rules out last option because code is now just too far gone
| with too many special cases hardcoded because AI sucks at
| abstraction or real software engineering.
| imiric wrote:
| I'm curious to see what you've built with all that extra
| productivity.
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| No one ever shares their great and shipped products. AI built
| slop is for generating hype not revenue or users.
| tempodox wrote:
| It does exude a strong scent of astroturfing.
| imiric wrote:
| That's not always the case.
|
| AI is often used to pump out sites and apps that scam
| users, SEO spam, etc. So there is definitely a revenue
| stream that makes scammers and grifters excited for AI.
| These tools have increased the scope and reach of their
| scams, and provide a huge boost to their productivity.
|
| That's partly why I'm curious about OP's work. Nobody who's
| using these tools while following best software engineering
| practices would claim that they're making them that much
| more productive. Reviewing the generated code and fixing
| issues counteracts whatever time is saved by generating
| code. But if they're vibe coding and don't even look at the
| code...
| mesmertech wrote:
| Not the OP but this is smth I've vibecoded using cursor:
| https://bestphoto.ai/ MRR ~$150. It basically started as a
| clone of my other site: https://aieasypic.com (MRR 2.5k,
| 5-8k/mo rev) since I was having trouble keeping code
| context in mind and claude was pretty bad at doing full
| features with the tech stack I used for that site(Django
| BE, NextJS FE) making adding new features a pain, so I
| completely switched to a stack that claude is very good at
| NextJS fullstack(trpc BE) and now it can basically one-shot
| a feature request.
|
| Just putting this here because a lot of times AI coding
| seems to be dismissed as smth that can't do actual work ie
| generate revenue, while its more like making money as a
| solo dev is already pretty rare and if you're working in a
| corp. instead you're not going to just post your company
| name when asked for examples on what you're using AI for.
| imiric wrote:
| Those are exactly the kind of AI slop products I would
| expect to be vibe coded. You've created yet another
| wrapper around LLM APIs where the business model is
| charging a premium over existing services. Your revenue
| depends on the ignorance of customers to not realize they
| can get the same or better service for cheaper from
| companies that actually do the hard work. I bet SEO
| hacking is really important to you.
|
| It's irrefutable that AI tools can be used to create
| software that generates revenue. What's more difficult is
| using them to create something that brings actual value
| into the world.
| mesmertech wrote:
| Sure man, any product you don't like is just "another
| wrapper". I guess every website is just a wrapper over
| postgres or wordpress too. I run my own serverless GPU
| containers on runpod with a combination of comfy and my
| own fastapi servers using diffusers, not that it'd even
| matter if I just used some third party APIs. It
| originally even started as smth that was hacked together
| using 4x 4070ti supers in my basement that I then moved
| to runpod. Indiehacking is mostly marketing, nobody cares
| if you built some technically beautiful thing.
|
| Also its easy to criticize from the sidelines but, do you
| have products that you made by yourself that are used by
| hundreds of thousands of people? I have 5 such sites, 2
| of which I named above
| imiric wrote:
| Hey, don't blame me for the fact that your sites are
| indistinguishable from hundreds of others that offer the
| same service. Everything I said is logical to assume,
| since all these sites look the same.
|
| Good on you for learning how AI tools work, but there's
| no way for anyone to tell whether your backend is self-
| managed or not, and practically it doesn't really matter.
| I reckon your users would get better results from
| proprietary models that expose an API than self-hosted
| open source ones, but then your revenue would probably be
| lower.
|
| > Also its easy to criticize from the sidelines but, do
| you have products that you made by yourself that are used
| by hundreds of thousands of people? I have 5 such sites,
| 2 of which I named above
|
| That's a lazy defense considering anyone is free to
| criticize anyone else's work, especially if they're
| familiar with the industry. Just like food and film
| critics don't need to be chefs and movie producers.
|
| But I'll give you credit for actually building and
| launching something that generates revenue. I admit that
| that is more than I have managed with my personal
| projects.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| Eh, it is more like an extended/better UI. Plenty of
| people are willing to pay for just that.
|
| There are lots of people that only use LLMs in whatever
| UI the model companies are providing. I have colleagues
| that will never venture outside the ChatGPT website, even
| though with some effort they could make their tooling
| richer by using the API and building some wrapper or UI
| for it.
| senko wrote:
| > yet another wrapper around LLM APIs
|
| Patio11 famously built, ran for a number of years
| (profitably) and then sold a "wrapper for a random number
| generator" (bingocardcreator.com)
|
| Value is in the eye of the beholder, and only
| tangentially related to the technical complexity or
| ingenuity.
| imiric wrote:
| I'm not arguing in favor of technical complexity or
| ingenuity.
|
| My point is that the perceived value of a service or
| product is directly related to its competitive advantage,
| product differentiation, and so on. When the service is
| made from the same cookie cutter template as all the
| others, the only value that can be extracted from it is
| by duping customers who don't know better.
|
| There are entire industries flooded with cheap and poorly
| made crap from companies that change brand names every
| week. Code generation tools have now enabled such
| grifters to profit from software as well.
| aquariusDue wrote:
| It's people configuring WordPress with various themes
| from Envato at jacked-up prices in a trench coat /s
|
| I'm only half joking.
| apwell23 wrote:
| I love examples like these. I eventually want to start a
| bunch of these too.
|
| thanks for sharing.
| ncruces wrote:
| The other day someone was gloating they'd created a 30k LoC
| code base in a few weeks with a similar setup.
|
| I'd consider that a liability, not an asset, but they were
| pretty happy with it.
| danielbln wrote:
| Man, who sucked the joy out of your life. Just try the damn
| thing. I have the staunchest anti-hypsters in my org and
| even they are using these tools heavily now.
|
| I build most of not all of my stuff for work, and I ain't
| sharing that.
|
| It's no panacea, but is there something to be had there?
| Abso-fucking-lutley. All of this would have been complete
| scifi at the beginning of this decade.
| submeta wrote:
| 100%!
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| I'm super pro AI. I've been using ChatGPT since the day
| it released. I use an agent coder at work semi-regularly
| to reasonable levels of success. Big fan.
|
| But I am exceedingly tired of phrases like "complete the
| work of weeks and months within days". If AI is making
| devs 5x to 10x faster then I'd like to see some actual
| results. Internet is full of hypesters that make
| bombastic claims of productivity but never actually shown
| anything they've made.
| submeta wrote:
| I work at a company with over 700 employees. And there are
| tons of use cases where a simple CRUD app is sufficient. Or
| where glue code needs to be written / changed for legacy
| systems. Or where an OS system like Camunda is deployed and
| needs to be configured, workflows developed, etc
|
| The reality of companies out there is much simpler than the
| challenges of a startup that needs to build systems that are
| state of the art, scale for millions of users, etc There are
| companies out there that make millions, in areas you've never
| heard of, and their core business does not depend on software
| development best practices.
|
| In our company we have an IT team with the median age of
| fifty, team members who never have developed software, just
| maintain systems, delegate hard work to expensive
| consultants.
|
| Now in that setting someone coming from a startup background
| is like someone coming from the future. I feel like a wizard
| who can solve problems in days, instead of weeks or months
| waiting for a consultant to solve.
| imiric wrote:
| Fair enough. There are valid use cases for vibe coding
| scripts and simple CRUD apps, which current AI tools are
| fairly competent at producing.
|
| The thing is that those don't typically take weeks and
| months to build with conventional tooling. And I find it
| hard to believe that all you're doing is this type of
| integration work. But I suppose there are companies that
| need such roles.
|
| > There are companies out there that make millions, in
| areas you've never heard of, and their core business does
| not depend on software development best practices.
|
| That is true.
|
| I do think that this cowboy coding approach is doing these
| companies a disservice, especially where tech is not their
| main product. It's only creating more operational risk that
| on-call and support staff have to deal with, and producing
| more technical debt that some poor soul will inevitably
| have to resolve one day. That is, it all appears to work
| until one edge case out of thousands brings down the entire
| system. Which could all be mitigated, if not avoided, by
| taking the time to understand the system and by following
| standard software development processes, even if it does
| take longer to implement.
|
| What you describe isn't new. This approach has existed long
| before the current wave of AI tooling. But AI tools make
| the problem worse by making it easier to ship code quickly
| without following any software development practices that
| ensure the software is robust and reliable.
|
| So, it's great that you're enjoying these tools. But I
| would suggest you adopt a more measured approach and work
| closely with those senior and junior engineers, instead of
| feeling like a wizard from the future.
| i_love_retros wrote:
| Who's reviewing all the code you are churning out with ai?
| If everyone is used to maintaining not developing software
| it doesn't sound like they'd be best suited to have to
| review lots of complex pull requests.
|
| It sounds like you are moving very fast and probably have
| people just clicking "approve".
|
| Good luck for the future to who ever owns your company!
| submeta wrote:
| When I setup systems, I thoroughly document them, test
| them, develop them according to architectural best
| practices. My AI assisted code generation is lightyears
| ahead of what I see in companies I have worked for. The
| best they --the companies---do is hire expensive
| consultants. Who sell them preconfigured system. And when
| you look into those systems you won't believe your eyes
| either. Because you instantly realise that those devs do
| not know much about architectural patterns, aout systems
| design, about software development best practices. Yet
| they sell their systems as well, because they offer a
| niche product where they have only a handful competitors.
|
| In that setting someone with solid software engineering
| background using AI to solve problems is like a wizard
| from the team's perspective.
|
| When I worked for startups I was constantly panicking to
| miss the latest tech trends, and I feared that I would be
| not marketable in case I didn't catch up. But in mature
| companies things work much slower. They work with decades
| old technology. In that setting not the latest tech
| counts but being able to solve problems, with whatever
| means you can.
| apwell23 wrote:
| did i miss it or did you still not answer
|
| > Who's reviewing all the code you are churning out with
| ai?
| asdf6969 wrote:
| He didn't answer because he didn't even read your
| comment. Likely a bot
| submeta wrote:
| Yeah, I am a bot.
| submeta wrote:
| I don't review every single line that AI generates. I
| glance over the files to see if they meet my standards,
| prompt it to rewrite this or that portion, when
| necessary. Or change it myself.
|
| Writing code is the most tedious part, not reviewing.
| apwell23 wrote:
| oh gotcha. you are a solo dev on the work you are doing.
| makes sense.
| submeta wrote:
| I am an IT project manager ;) But apparently you can
| solve lots of problems with code.
| aquariusDue wrote:
| Gemini of course! /s
|
| Personally I've had mixed experience when I let Sonnet
| 3.7 document my (and its) code and write commit messages,
| for some wip stuff it's alright but it soon gets out of
| hand and because it doesn't really have a direct view in
| my mind it ends up documenting what it sees instead of
| the intention behind it, which is totally fair but eh.
|
| So yeah, mileage varies and agentic tools usually spit
| out more code and redundant comments than I'd like to
| review. I'm still waiting for a company to develop some
| sanity check for this somehow but snapshot testing and
| manual review aren't enough sadly.
| AJRF wrote:
| Do you do all this switching during the workday?
| shivenigma wrote:
| > But I don't review files that much anymore.
|
| Say no more.
| danielbln wrote:
| I review PRs/commits, not files. Given the right cage to lock
| the agent inside, and guardrails built around, and
| conventions and guidelines, and agentic flows so it can pull
| in what's needed.. the need to look at every line and file
| during implementation is significantly lessened. So then I
| review the final output (which is a unit of work/task wrapped
| in a PR).
| mr_toad wrote:
| IDEs were a crutch, and now that crutch has been replaced by a
| semi-autonomous bot that can fetch and carry.
| prashantsengar wrote:
| Curious - how did moving from iTerm2 to Ghostty help? I
| currently use iTerm2 and have never used Claude Code
| submeta wrote:
| Ghostty is gpu accelerated. It's super fast, and tmux in it
| is a joy to use. That combined with NeoVim gives me an
| increadibly smooth dev experience in the terminal, something
| I had never have with iTerm2 and emacs.
| Eggpants wrote:
| Try again. No self respecting Emacs user would ever call vim
| "good".
| submeta wrote:
| Haha :) I lived inside Emacs, used orgmode for everything,
| have written tons of Elisp, used org-roam as my second brain,
| used vanilla Emacs shortcuts instead of Evil (with a special
| keyboard settup using Karabiner Elements), did even my
| googling from Emacs, used emacs calc instead of my
| calculator, but in the end I spent more time tinkering my
| Emacs setup than doing real work. Emacs was a lifestyle. At
| some point I realized: Unix and the terminal are what Emacs
| try to be: It tries to be a one-stop shop offering you
| everything: Surfing the web, writing emails, word processor,
| calculator, planner, terminal. Unix and the terminal offer me
| all of that. Plus any scripting language. Why miss all the
| beautiful apps, just to be an Emacs zealot? The editor in
| emacs is just one usecase. Neovim does it just as well, if
| not better.
|
| But relax, noone is taking your Emacs from you :) I still
| like it, but am not a disciple anymore ;)
| mountainriver wrote:
| When generating code that is often wrong and needing to review
| it, and IDE is demonstrably better, this isn't an argument
| apwell23 wrote:
| > But I don't review files that much anymore.
|
| they don't review files anymore though.
| MarcelOlsz wrote:
| >Migrated from iTerm2 to Ghostty and Tmux
|
| Would love to hear more.
| mvkel wrote:
| Bullet dodged.
|
| Windsurf's value to OpenAI was for the latter to "see the whole
| chessboard" of context, which is helpful when you're training
| models to be good at coding.
|
| But codex (and Claude Code) fulfill this from the CLI, and it's a
| first-party utility, not an acquisition.
| mrdependable wrote:
| I wonder how these two events came to be declared in the same
| news release.
| seatac76 wrote:
| How long does Windsurf go on now? Losing your CEO to a poach job
| not even an acquihire must blow up any fund raising plans.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Smart move, I always wonder if they have disposable money to
| spend on stuff like this and figure out what to do with it after.
| xnx wrote:
| Nice to get a sanity check that confirms Windsurf was never
| really worth $3B to all those who thought that number was
| ridiculous.
| fnord77 wrote:
| Google is paying $2.4billion to them
| diegof79 wrote:
| I'm not surprised. I started using Windsurf when it came out
| because I liked its UX better than Cursor's.
|
| However, while Cursor and GH Copilot improved, Windsurf went in
| the opposite direction. On each update, I started to get more and
| more issues. The agent often tried to run shell commands, and it
| hung up, or I found minor UI bugs. One day, I decided to give GH
| Copilot another chance, and I was surprised by how it evolved, to
| the point that it worked better than Windsurf for my usage. I
| don't know what happened internally at Windsurf, but I notice the
| degradation as a user. If my case indicates what happened to
| other users, maybe OpenAI saw declining subscriptions and
| canceled the deal.
| beambot wrote:
| Are these "acquihire & license" the new M&A...? I recall hearing
| that this was a "hack" to avoid DOJ and FTC scrutiny over
| acquisitions, but I have no clue how such deals are structured.
| Anyone care to chime in?
| smcleod wrote:
| Honestly there's no value that windsurf, cursor and all the other
| VSCode forks provide that couldn't be provided as an extension
| and even then - none of them perform as well for agentic coding
| as Cline / Roo Code (debates about the subscription pricing aside
| due to people often not realising their model limits, public US
| only based APIs, pay for useful API limits etc aside).
| sashank_1509 wrote:
| So the result of aggressively scrutinizing big tech acquisitions
| is acquihires, not a more competitive tech ecosystem with say
| more IPO's.
|
| The libertarian spin on this would be government should have
| never scrutinized acquisitions and the result is just worse for
| everyone.
|
| The progressive spin would be to now ban acquihires somehow, and
| then whatever new legal invention will be created next. I can
| imagine the next step being, creating a consulting company out of
| your startup and then selling yourself as consultants to big
| techs. Now you are neither acquired nor technically acqui-hired
| and the whackamole continues.
|
| At some point, we need to realize the solution is the culture of
| people involved. If the government could just ask to reduce
| acquisitions to make the ecosystem more competitive and companies
| tried following it in spirit to the best of their ability, we
| might have much better results than whatever we have now. When
| culture degrades, the govt can't trust companies, the companies
| can't trust the govt, everything just gets worse, regardless of
| what rules you write and enforce.
| agd wrote:
| This wasn't a result of regulator scrutiny. The issue was that
| MS (owner of Copilot) was demanding access to the IP (due to
| their existing agreement with OpenAI), and OpenAI was
| resisting. In addition, Claude blocked access to Windsurf,
| which also damaged them as an acquisition target.
|
| Nothing to do with regulators.
| sashank_1509 wrote:
| I find this hard to believe considering all the recent
| acquihires that happened recently like Character AI,
| Inflection, Covariant AI, Scale AI, context AI and so on.
| Maybe you're right about the specifics of this situation, but
| my prior for this being an acquihire is very high and I would
| need to see very compelling evidence that that is not the
| case.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| The culture of the people involved got us to this point, I'm
| not sure it's the solution to the problem.
|
| > The progressive spin would be to now ban acquihires somehow,
| and then whatever new legal invention will be created next.
|
| Progressive has become a moving target, but the pro-competition
| view would be to break up the massively concentrated companies
| that are further consolidating markets. Thats what the Khan FTC
| was trying to do, but we need a Congress interested in a
| competitive marketplace, which we haven't had in a while.
| ashraymalhotra wrote:
| Just curious - would this negatively affect OpenAI's ability to
| acquire companies in the future?
| ec109685 wrote:
| They have got get their act together from a structure
| standpoint or these types of acquisitions are going keep
| failing.
| nrmitchi wrote:
| This isn't a great look for OpenAI, but acquisitions fall
| through all the time.
|
| The issue isn't an acquisition not working out, it's that the
| founding/exec team felt it appropriate to arrange their own
| exits and abandon their team before even communicating that
| their "successful exit" wasn't actually happening.
| kolja005 wrote:
| Funny to see this today.
|
| I'm a rank and file dev at a non-big tech company and I got a
| call from a Windsurf sales rep this week who I had connected with
| on LinkedIn the day before (I never gave them my number). They
| told me my company was in talks with Windsurf about a licensing
| deal but that they would give me a 30 day trial of an enterprise
| account for use on personal projects to let me try it in advance.
| I guess the idea for them is to build enthusiasm among devs in
| the company?
|
| Is this a standard sales strategy for products like this? It
| seems pretty aggressive to me but I'm just an engineer so I
| wouldn't know.
| aabhay wrote:
| Very standard yep. Sales folks are sort of trained
| /indoctrinated into telling white lies like that in order to
| get in the door. There are loads of examples of using fake
| momentum to close deals. If its a senior person it's "My CEO
| asked me to personally reach out to you" or a fake email from
| the CEO forwarded by the rep. If one person at the company uses
| it, it's "we're negotiating a company wide license" or "we
| already have a group license with extra seats" or "one of your
| teammates sent us a list of priority teammates" yada yada.
| blindriver wrote:
| The founders fucked over the employees and the investors and sold
| out. I guess they don't care if they are worth $200M each but
| they fucked every employee that poured their heart out into that
| company.
|
| I hope no one works for them again.
| almost_usual wrote:
| This is why working for startups is not worth it.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Lol.
|
| I commented on the OG thread something like "weird since MSFT
| owns VS Code" and got downvoted to oblivion.
|
| Yet here we are, always right :).
| SamDc73 wrote:
| When Claude kind of cut them off, they realized these AI Agentic
| tools are as good as your model, little to no moat here.
|
| And it was a crazy deal to begin with, for reference JetBrains
| who's building IDEs for 24 years are evaluated at $7 billions
| screye wrote:
| Works out for Google and the C-suite. Horrible for the employees.
| These fake-acquisitions are effectively arbitrage against
| employees, who get left holding nothing. Should be illegal and
| regulated.
|
| Not sure how the VCs get their cut. I'm guessing that Google can
| balance it out by participating in rounds for other startups in
| that VC's porfolio.
| slad wrote:
| I have been using Windsurf for few months. They even have their
| own AI model SWE-1 model. I really liked using Windsurf. They
| also have integrations with other IDEs ex: jetbrains, VS code,
| etc.
|
| This week I have been using Claude Code and Windsurf side by
| side. I would make change with one, stash it, ask the other for
| similar change and then would diff it.
|
| Overall Windsurf was pretty on a par with Claude code.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| and Windsurf employees have worthless equity and no CEO
|
| loool dead
| SMAAART wrote:
| How does this happens?
|
| They raised A, B, and C round (according to CrunchBase), and then
| the founders just walk away and get a job/deal at Google?
| moralestapia wrote:
| Nepotism.
|
| The same set of rules that apply to you and me are not
| universal.
| manquer wrote:
| Perhaps it as combination of how much founders were diluted and
| how much they are being offered upfront. We are hearing about
| $100M signing bonuses.
|
| It is hard to say no when Google/Meta gives you say $100M
| upfront and hundreds more if not Billion+ in RSUs. After 3
| rounds it is not unreasonable to have only 5-10%.
|
| 10% of a company worth a few billion burning a lot of cash,
| that needs to keep raising more rounds i.e more dilution, may
| have less value than RSUs from multi-trillion dollar publicly
| traded liquid tech company today.
|
| It is also quite hard to raise $5-10+Billion in cash. There are
| only handful of startups which have ever done so
|
| Very few funds/investors can afford to do so large rounds. This
| was SoftBank's thesis for most of last decade, compete by just
| outfunding competing products in a market.
| t0mas88 wrote:
| The deal for the founders may not have been as good as what
| Google offered. They may only hold 10% after those rounds, a
| serious part of the acquisition price could go to liquidation
| preferences of the VCs and the deal is mostly in OpenAI stock
| instead of cash. Not that hard to imagine the Google option
| offering them much more actual cash right now.
| osigurdson wrote:
| This certainly aligns with my own usage. I'm currently using
| OpenAI's own Codex 50:1 compared to Windsurf. For me, I'd rather
| take some time to create a good quality prompt and have it work
| away for a few minutes and create a material delta. It isn't
| always perfect, and I often have to make a few tweaks myself, but
| it is much nicer and waiting around and watching Windsurf bang
| around on a tiny part of the solution. Windsurf is still nice to
| use for quick UI iteration however.
| asciii wrote:
| This sounds terrible if they're just taking management and key
| employees?
|
| Imagine backing this startup and the founder team takes a
| parachute...
| awaymazdacx5 wrote:
| nonexclusive proprietary licensing at its zenith
| mortsmel wrote:
| I don't know if you noticed but cursors language server aspect
| that runs the coding edits and stuff like that from a server to
| the workstation is a lot better than windsurf.
|
| Windsurf phone's home on every code edit that you have and takes
| on 30% load on your servers or on your workstation depending on
| what you're running.
|
| I would strongly discourage the use of windsurf on your systems.
|
| Case in point their AI model that they just built.
| nrmitchi wrote:
| This whole situation feels shockingly close to the Meta/Scale
| situation, where founders and specific employees were plucked
| out, and effectively gutted any future prospects for the company.
|
| At least in the Scale case there seemed to be some form of payout
| to employees and equity holders, but this takes it a whole lot
| further by just throwing out all other employees.
|
| There is _supposed to be_ the concept that "all common stock is
| the same". These fake-acquisitions completely undermine that.
| BrtByte wrote:
| Yep, if investors and early employees keep getting left out in
| the cold while execs get a soft landing at Big Tech, it's going
| to shake a lot of trust in the startup game
| herval wrote:
| I don't think anyone trusts any tech company much these days.
| It's been a steep decline in the past 5 years, from arbitrary
| mandates to the constant talk about firing everyone and
| hiring an AI. Even as an investor, it's hard to trust that
| the "honor system" that once existed is still in play.
| neilv wrote:
| > _Google will instead hire Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan, cofounder
| Douglas Chen, and some of Windsurf's R &D employees and bring
| them onto the Google DeepMind team, [...] Google will not have
| any control over nor a stake in Windsurf, but it will take a non-
| exclusive license to some of Windsurf's technology. [...] Google
| didn't share how much it was paying to bring on the team. OpenAI
| was previously reported to be buying Windsurf for $3 billion._
|
| Why not an acquisition?
|
| How did Google get Windsurf and investors to agree to this
| maneuver that decapitated the leadership and key talent, without
| a big exit event for everyone?
|
| My read of the article: "Here's x% of what OpenAI offered you,
| you waive legal challenges while we cherry-pick your people and
| license the tech in their heads, and you can keep the company,
| and everyone left behind can promote themselves to fill the
| vacancies."
| taspeotis wrote:
| If they acquire a company they might need approval due to anti-
| trust.
|
| If the people instead just quit their jobs and start working at
| Google ... nothing to see here.
| neilv wrote:
| And everyone who didn't get a Google employee badge agreed
| because "x%" was big enough?
| rfks wrote:
| I guess VCs can't force founders to stay (the only penalty
| for joining Google is loosing some/all of their Windsurf
| equity, but I'm sure they chose what's better for them),
| and employees didn't need to agree (they have no vote).
| neilv wrote:
| I can guess a few angles and causes for legal action. I'm
| wondering what the deal was to incentive people not to
| take that legal action.
| impulser_ wrote:
| Is Lina Khan to blame for this new acquihire meta? She was very
| aggressive in blocking any tech acquisition during her time and
| ever since we have seen more and more acquihires which I believe
| these companies are using to prevent themselves from getting
| sued.
|
| Google is having a hard time acquiring Wiz for 32b, and if it's
| blocked they owe 3.2b to Wiz. So why risk it when you can just
| spend the money to hire the talent behind it and spend a few
| month building out a new product.
| hatenberg wrote:
| The police is to blame for trying to enforce the law, it makes
| criminals innovate is exactly the kind of take I come here for.
| cornfieldlabs wrote:
| Update:
|
| > Google hires Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan, others in $2.4 billion
| AI talent deal
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/11/google-windsurf-ceo-varun-mo...
| hedayet wrote:
| I was so surprised (or shocked) to hear that Windsurf was getting
| acquired for 3 billion dollars, I made an HN post asking about
| the truth of that news -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43933825. HN's system didn't
| like my tone I guess and removed it, lol.
|
| But in any case, I just can't see how AI code editors like
| Windsurf or Cursor, without any proprietary model, can be valued
| at billions. What's the underlying IP that justifies these
| valuations?
| rpunkfu wrote:
| Similar thing to what we've witnessed with crypto coins. It's
| AI season and those with money invest in it, pump it and will
| exit post IPO. Difference here is, that besides value that
| those products "hold", it's possible also to provide AI as a
| service, making Google / Microsoft etc interested.
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| They both have proprietary models.
| vachina wrote:
| They sell stuff that actually works, and people who use it
| convince people who pay money to pay for it.
| BrtByte wrote:
| Maybe Google sees something under the hood
| muskmusk wrote:
| I guess masks are completely off now. We can see who sells out to
| the highest bidder and who won't sell because they care more
| about the mission.
| raphinou wrote:
| Anyone know what the deal was? Can it be scrapped like that? I
| expected to read more info about that but it's not even
| mentioned.
| Weryj wrote:
| Could be conditional on DD and deliverables
| BrtByte wrote:
| Wow, this is a pretty fascinating twist. First OpenAI's $3B deal
| falls through, and now Google swoops in to poach the key talent
| anyway? Classic big-tech maneuvering
| s_ting765 wrote:
| Sounds like the death knell for Open AI. They can't outswim the
| FAANG sharks. Once Microsoft is out, it's over for them.
| iwontberude wrote:
| I can't wait for these companies to start laying people off so I
| can buy their house. They are inflating real estate prices with
| their dumb AI money.
| TechSquidTV wrote:
| If this isn't some kind of sign of the times, idk what is. This
| is too far.
| d_sc wrote:
| There's a lot of talk about Claude Code in here, and I agree it's
| a great agentic coding tool. One of the benefits of Cursor &
| Windsurf is/was the ease for smaller companies to setup Team
| accounts and have control over spend.
|
| Claude Code I think misses this. You can get an enterprise
| account if you commit to over, what.. 70 seats annually?
|
| If you're an individual you can get Max 5x/20x ..
|
| But for smaller companies, I don't think they are addressing that
| space. Am I wrong? Are there any Agentic tools like Claude Code
| that can provide a fixed cost per user?
| mikeg8 wrote:
| A small company can just pay the $250 a month for X number of
| employees to each have CC max plan. Not that complicated
| thorio wrote:
| This my friends is how the next iteration of venture capital
| contract templates becomes even longer...
|
| Otherwise, normally with the amount of capital raised by
| Windsurf, the founders must have signed some kind of non-compete
| for the event of a bad-leaver (which this obviously is). Guess
| covering these penalties was just part of Google's deal, hm?
| warthog wrote:
| i would be so pissed if I was an employee who got nothing out of
| the deal and left to dry now
| sammerslam wrote:
| Wow must have seen the numbers and decideed they wanted to call
| it off. Not a good business model probably so the human talent is
| where you find the best amount. Still why would anyone ever want
| to work at Google? Don't they know they are contributing to a
| system that covertly disseminates information they want you to
| see. Especially the AI models. Has anyone ever wondered about the
| training data sometimes? What would people think of them if they
| knew they had the entire pestein list in their hands but decided
| its better to protect the ones that pay them. People need to
| reconsider what they believe from AI, it can be extremely abused
| to scale narratives.
| jspaetzel wrote:
| It's somewhat telling that the most valuable part of an company
| is the people, some things don't change
| asdf6969 wrote:
| Can someone explain how this works financially for the
| acquihired? I know they aren't joining like a regular employee
| with a high TC. Does Google offer them a giant multi-million
| (billion?) dollar signing bonus? Why would they tank the value of
| the company they own just to be another employee at Google?
| janpaul123 wrote:
| Kilo Code CEO here. We'd like to welcome ex-Windsurf users by
| offering you $100 in credits. :D We'd love to show how through
| open source there is a better way (better community, more
| transparent pricing, won't mess with your or the product).
| https://blog.kilocode.ai/p/windsurf-is-over-switch-to-open-s...
| twolf910616 wrote:
| dang, I feel like my Bay to Breaker tote bag value just went up
| 10x right?
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